For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country's oldest and most illustrious families-the Cabots, the Lowells: the "first, best people"-by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place, awash with secrets. As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town's prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in-and out of-the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers.