#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GMA BOOK CLUB PICK • A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) • A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

"A bold and biting satire, Yesteryear…will have you cackling and gasping right to the final page."
—Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid series

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

Yesteryear caused some pretty strong divisions between our group. On the plus side, Burke has clearly researched the phenomenon of tradwives and gives us a compelling and true picture of much of that world, from the belief systems to the online lifestyle to the lack of feasibility of that kind of simple rural existence without support. All of us agreed that the first half of the novel presents Natalie (our protagonist) effectively, letting us see how she's ambitious and talented and deeply fraught about the modern world, struggling between her faith and her desire to have agency over her life. Burke also does a good job presenting Natalie as a growing influencer and what kinds of work that takes. It's clear that she has done her homework in researching this book. Those that didn't like Yesteryear primarily had issues with the plot. The novel flips between the modern story of Natalie as she meets her husband Caleb, has kids, and starts her farm, and an 1855 life of more accurate homestead existence with a different husband and family. Without spoiling the core of the book, many of us found the explanation of the time jumping to be underdeveloped and contrived. There were some NUBClubbers who could see the threads that led to the 1855 sections of the book involving Caleb's background, but others thought those links were too tenuous. Just as importantly though, the second half of the book entirely betrays the first half. We occupy Natalie's mind to see a complex person who is judgmental and faithful but still has some points over the more liberated women around her, but by the end of the novel, we're quite definitively shown that Natalie has been wrong about everything and is much weaker and more evil than we were initially led to believe. Given that is likely true about the real models that Burke used to created this story, some of us thought that was an appropriate ending, but the detractors felt that we walked into the book thinking tradwives were lying and morally backwards, so we're not learning anything from a novel that just reinforces that simple perspective. Some of us even questioned why Burke needed the time travel at all; the interesting part of the novel is how Natalie and Caleb navigate the world cushioned by their faith, conservatism, and money. Ultimately, Yesteryear is mixed. It's a very real portrait of an interesting and troubling social phenomenon of our times that struck some of us a just and consistent moral tale and others of us as an obvious and contrived missed opportunity.