The Kept

[Read by Kate Udall]

In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Midwife Elspeth Howell returns home to the her husband, and four of her children, murdered. Before she can discover her remaining son Caleb, alive and hiding in the kitchen pantry, another shot rings out over the snow-covered valley. Twelve-year-old Caleb must tend to his mother until she recovers enough for them to take to the frozen wilderness in search of the men responsible. They are led to a rough-hewn lake town, defined by the violence both of its landscape and its inhabitants. There Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood and slowly begins to discover truths he never expected.