Publication date March 26, 2024

Launch Event

Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, Vermont, Thursday, April 18, 2024, 7 pm

Novel’s Synopsis

Amy Barnes, a high school English teacher from Hawai’i, and Paul Rideau, a Vermont farmer, lead ordinary lives dedicated to their families and their work, but each nurses a quiet passion for creative expression—Paul in painting and Amy in poetry. When their personal worlds fracture, they each struggle to find their way through crushing loss and grief. Their creative pursuits help them heal as well as reimagine their lives as authentic selves. 

A quiet, literary story, The Red Wheelbarrow reminds us of the power of art to transform, of love and decency to triumph, and of hope to endure.

Early Reviews

“Richly engaging, original, and full of heart, The Red Wheelbarrow is a book that sneaks up on you, sketching the characters’ lives in scenes and fragments that gradually build in interest and mystery. Amy and Paul, two separate, seemingly unremarkable people, marry, work, and raise families over decades. Unaware of one another, each of them nurses a quiet, almost secret, hope of another dimension to their lives, in which their own creative gifts might flourish. Matthews masterfully weaves Paul’s and Amy’s stories through a series of nonsequential scenes that build a world large enough to contain both their hopes and their disappointments, guiding us to a surprising and gratifying conclusion. This book moved me in unexpected ways. The sheer decency of Matthews’s characters and their hard won willingness to claim happiness for themselves as well as those they love make this novel a triumph of the spirit as well as the heart.”

—Cynthia Huntington, 2012 National Book Awards Poetry Finalist and author of Heavenly Bodies

“Matthews’ novel has me looking at the world differently. The story’s two protagonists, Amy and Paul, each have their own compelling trajectories, guided by their conscious choices, moral compasses, and shifting circumstances. But in Matthews’ artfully crafted story, the daily drama and decisions that make up these characters’ lives are also guided by another force—call it destiny for lack of a more nuanced word. How masterful, to achieve a novel that opens the reader’s eyes to the significance of our everyday actions...but also the mysteries of the universe. One of the most thought-provoking and affirming novels I’ve read in a long time.”

—Joni B. Cole, author of Party Like It’s 2044

“The Red Wheelbarrow is a book you will want to give someone who needs to be reminded of hope. It is an affirmation that, though we may not understand it, there is a force for order and meaning at work in the world. In this novel, Matthews reveals a force moving through the story that keeps us riveted for what is around the next corner of a person’s life.

This novel is a joy to read and a reason to celebrate...the story calls us forward into possibilities. You’ll be fortunate to settle in with the characters and ride along without any naivete or forcing a theme.

It is, without sentimentality, a story of serendipity and mystery. Matthews’ characters are ones we identify with and come to cheer for, bringing comfort and realization of our own hope for a life of meaning and a place in the world. The book and its characters capture the long, circuitous path toward what is most meaningful and lasting: connection with another. The characters take an ordinary journey toward the extraordinary ending of possibilities we all long for.”

—Lani Leary, PhD, author of No One Has to Die Alone: Preparing for a Meaningful Death

“Matthews, a master of description, places her novel The Red Wheelbarrow beautifully, in alternate locations, set between Hawai’i and New England, and achieves an elegant balance as the two main characters subtly come together and move apart over their lifetimes, their dance resting offstage like an unfinished promise, tantalizing. Matthews knows how to keep the tension in a skillful, deft way, as these characters interweave, make mistakes, mature, grow, evolve through life’s challenges, in a story told always in prose lit with poetic images, like a red wheelbarrow, its paint chipping, or a cloud of butterflies, lifting above a field.”

—Laura Foley, poet and author of It’s This

“Matthews guides us from Hawai’i to New England where one woman’s stories of honest domestic rage and defiance emerge amongst a teasing historical scrapbook of what love can wage. Here is a novel about families living with the fallout between coming-of-age and the written page years later; a lifelong birth of personal liberation, fraught. To the protagonist, a teacher, there is travel and glamour after she has ruled out expectation and the social cues of her mother’s generation. Secret thoughts, rumors, and private ambitions remind us that we’re each buying time to finish the giant canvas of our lives. Take The Red Wheelbarrow with you to the edge of the sand, to the road and field and pond, and into night.”

—Peter Money, author of Oh When the Saints