Sarah Damoff’s 2026 novel, The Burning Side, is a work of contemporary domestic fiction that explores the deconstruction and potential rebuilding of a modern family. The story centers on April and Leo Torres, a couple whose strained marriage reaches a breaking point on the same night a fire destroys their family home. Forced to move in with April’s parents, the estranged couple must navigate the logistical and emotional fallout of the disaster while confronting the unspoken resentments that led to their collapse, all under the watchful eyes of April’s family. The narrative examines several key themes, including Preserving Love Through Shared Memories, The Ramifications of Unresolved Trauma, and Forgiveness Through Mutual Accountability.

The novel is Damoff’s second, following The Bright Years, and continues her focus on complex family dynamics. Damoff’s debut is a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and a Southern Literary Review Book of the Year, and it has been translated into 14 languages. The Burning Side is set in Damoff’s home state of Texas in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the novel examines how external crises can expose and amplify internal fractures within a family. Rather than following a path of vengeance, the characters must move beyond a singular narrative of betrayal to achieve reconciliation through a shared, more complex understanding of their mutual failures.

This guide refers to the 2026 Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, death by suicide, child abuse, pregnancy loss, suicidal ideation, mental illness, substance use, and sexual content.

Plot Summary

April Torres, a former tutor, and Leonardo “Leo” Torres, a history teacher, live in a U-shaped house in Argyle, Texas, with their two young children, Sadie and Otto. Their marriage is strained; Leo has been sleeping on the floor in his son’s room for weeks. One evening, as April boils pasta for dinner, Leo quietly tells her that he wants a divorce. Distraught, April forgets to turn off the stove burner. Later that night, she awakens to a house full of smoke. She stumbles out the front door with Otto and a copy of Leo’s self-published novel, Seventh City, while Leo rescues Sadie from her bed. The family watches as firefighters battle the blaze consuming the kitchen side of their home. Shaken and possessing only the clothes on their backs, they take refuge at the nearby Dallas home of April’s parents, Deb and Billy Russo. The close quarters intensify the tension between April and Leo as they navigate the aftermath of the fire and the unspoken reality of their impending separation.

Life at the Russo house becomes a pressure cooker of family crises. Billy begins showing signs of severe memory loss, culminating in a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. His condition is exacerbated when he gets lost and drives two hours south to Waco, a town he knew in his youth. A kind hardware-store manager named Ricardo helps him until April and Deb arrive. Meanwhile, April’s brother, Cameron, announces his engagement to his girlfriend, Rachel, adding wedding planning to the family’s turmoil. Overwhelmed, Leo moves out of the Russo home and into a trailer on their property in Argyle to oversee the cleanup. He and April officially file for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences.” The family unit fractures further when April’s sister, Josie, a traveling actress, returns home and begins asking pointed questions about April and Leo’s relationship. As they sort through the wreckage of their home, April discovers a photograph of Leo’s estranged father and is shocked to see that he has the same distinctive lion tattoo as Ricardo, the manager from the Waco hardware store.

Realizing that the man who helped her father is Leo’s own long-lost father, Ricardo “Rico” Torres, April drives back to Waco. She confirms his identity and convinces him to meet with Leo. At a roadside restaurant, Leo confronts the father who abandoned him as a child. Rico reveals that Leo’s mother, Ana, died by suicide shortly after Leo was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Izzy and Nacho, as she couldn’t recover from the loss of her second pregnancy. Rico claims that Nacho kept the death a secret from Leo, believing it would be too painful for the boy to know. Shattered by this lifelong deception and the finality of his mother’s absence, Leo lashes out at April for orchestrating the meeting but allows her to stay with him in his trailer that night as he grieves. In the following weeks, their home is officially declared a total loss by their insurance company, and they make the difficult decision to have the structure demolished, selling the land as a vacant lot.

On the day of the demolition, April brings Leo a new novel, Identity, written by their former student Jonathan Gutierrez, which contains a heartfelt acknowledgment to them both. They read it together at a local bookstore as their house is torn down. Their time is cut short when they learn that Billy has been rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. After the surgery, Billy’s Alzheimer’s worsens drastically; in his post-anesthesia confusion, he believes that he’s a young man again and fails to recognize Deb. Later, April signs the divorce petition and returns to Leo’s trailer to finish Jonathan’s book. During her visit, Leo stubs his toe, causing a deep gash. As April bandages his foot, Leo becomes emotional and apologizes, admitting, “In my fear of being abandoned, I abandoned you” (266). He confesses that her emotional distance after their children were born made him feel unwanted, causing him to withdraw. April asks for forgiveness for her affair with a colleague, Cody Blanchard, which Leo discovered just before the fire. Confronted with their mutual failings, Leo asks April if she truly wants a divorce. They both admit that they don’t. He retrieves their fire-damaged marriage certificate, which has a typo dating it to 2031, and asks her to marry him again. Looking at the divorce papers on the table, he tells her to burn them, and they make love on a blanket under the stars on their now-empty land.

In the wake of their reconciliation, April and Leo commit to rebuilding their marriage through individual and couples therapy. Leo cautiously begins to form a relationship with Rico, who shares more about his and Ana’s tragic story. At the same time, Deb and Billy decide to sell their large family home on Lexington Avenue and move into an assisted-living community called Greenwood Hills. Deb makes this choice so that she can be Billy’s wife rather than solely his caretaker as his disease progresses. The Russo children support their parents’ decision, and the family comes together to help them move. Rico is slowly welcomed into the family, attending holidays and meeting his grandchildren, Sadie and Otto, for the first time. The family navigates their collective grief and changes with a renewed sense of commitment to one another.

Thirty years later, the family gathers for dinner at April and Leo’s condo. April now has advanced Alzheimer’s herself. She no longer recognizes photos of her own former students in a large collage and has forgotten that her parents, Deb and Billy, have passed away. Despite her severe memory loss, she is happy and enveloped in the love of her family. Leo remains her devoted partner, reading to her and caring for her. Sadie and Otto are now grown and have families of their own. Otto’s young daughter, Ana, sits at the table with her grandmother, a living testament to a family that has endured fire, loss, and illness, its foundation of love proving to be the one thing that lasts.