Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear (2026) is a psychological thriller and social satire that explores the curated world of influencer culture. The story follows Natalie Heller Mills, a successful Christian “tradwife” influencer who has built a lucrative brand on a romanticized vision of domestic, pastoral life. After her world is upended by a public scandal, Natalie inexplicably wakes up in the year 1855, where she is held captive by a brutal, archaic version of her own family and forced to confront the harsh reality of the pioneer life she once sold as an aesthetic.

The novel explores themes including The Distance Between Online Identity and Lived Reality, Domestic Labor as a Form of Gendered Subjugation, and The Irony of Nostalgia for a Brutal Past. Yesteryear engages directly with the 21st-century “tradwife” phenomenon, a social media trend where influencers perform and monetize a return to traditional gender roles. Burke, a cultural critic and cohost of the politics and culture podcast Diabolical Lies, uses the novel to satirize the contradictions of this movement. The book generated significant pre-publication buzz, becoming a New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America Book Club pick. Amazon MGM Studios acquired the film rights in a competitive bidding war, with Anne Hathaway slated to star as Natalie and serve as a producer.

This guide is based on the 2026 Alfred A. Knopf first hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, gender discrimination, sexual content, sexual violence, antigay bias, pregnancy loss and termination, cursing, mental illness, illness or death, graphic violence, animal cruelty or death, racism, and substance use.

Plot Summary

Natalie Heller Mills is a 32-year-old Christian lifestyle influencer, six months pregnant with her sixth child, living on Yesteryear Ranch, a 500-acre farm in rural Idaho. Part 1 follows Natalie’s perspective of “the last day of the life I imagined for myself” (3), describing a Content Day of filming sourdough tutorials and family dinners. Beneath her wholesome persona, Natalie is calculating and contemptuous. She privately scorns her followers, her employees, and even her children. That evening, Natalie’s 21-year-old producer, Shannon, resigns from her role. Natalie is aware that her husband, Caleb, and Shannon are having an affair. Caleb announces that his father, Doug, a senator who is mounting a presidential bid, wants Caleb to run for office. Natalie, who has orchestrated both Shannon’s departure and Caleb’s political push, feigns surprise and promises to pray on it.

Part 2 alternates between two narrative strands: one that reveals Natalie’s backstory, which is told entirely in past tense, and one that suddenly finds her in the year 1855, which is told in present tense. In the present-tense strand, Natalie wakes up in a version of Yesteryear that resembles the one she lives in, but she has four unfamiliar children, antiquated furniture, and no electricity. Natalie gradually discovers that she is in the year 1855. When Natalie steps outside, a man who resembles an older and more menacing version of Caleb approaches her. Natalie tries to flee, but the man catches her and slaps her unconscious.

The past-tense strand traces Natalie’s life from adolescence forward. Natalie grows up in a strict Christian household in rural Idaho with her mother and older sister, Abigail, after her father abandons the family. At Harvard, Natalie is repelled by secular campus culture and isolates herself until she joins a Christian student group, where she meets Caleb. Caleb is the youngest of five sons in the Mills political dynasty, a directionless young man whose father is a sitting senator. Their courtship moves quickly: by the fourth date they share a first kiss, and they marry the following summer.

After the birth of their first daughter, Clementine, Natalie experiences severe postpartum distress and realizes Caleb is unemployable, content to play with babies and browse conspiracy forums. At the Mills estate in California, she discovers that Doug and his wife, Amelia, are equally desperate to fix their youngest son. Natalie’s mother advises her to imagine she is always being watched, a strategy Natalie adopts as the foundational logic of her future influencer career.

To prove that she can be the perfect wife to Caleb, Natalie secretly bids on an Idaho ranch, fulfilling his aspiration to become a cowboy. Doug agrees to fund the ranch on the condition that Natalie have more children. Caleb agrees to move to the ranch, but imposes strict rules on their lifestyle based on what he has read online. Natalie names the property Yesteryear. The early years are disastrous: Chicks and dairy cows die from neglect and untreated illness. Natalie struggles to conceive, eventually resorting to self-insemination.

In the present-tense timeline, Natalie slowly acclimates to the primitive 1855 household while also reckoning with the unexplained disappearance of her pregnancy. The eldest of the children, Mary, is stern, challenging Natalie’s command of the household. Natalie attempts to escape twice. The first ends when Natalie steps into a steel trap in the woods. Mary stitches the wound. The second ends when Old Caleb catches Natalie and places her on house arrest. Natalie finds the fragment of a lapel microphone in the dirt and convinces herself she is on a reality television show, a theory that restores her hope of returning to the world she knew. Later, Natalie reinterprets her situation as a special test God has made for her.

The past-tense strand continues through Natalie’s rise to fame. A popular men’s-rights livestreamer praises Natalie as a traditional wife. Natalie’s followers surge from 3,000 to over 300,000 overnight. Natalie hires nannies and begins secretly siphoning Instagram income into a private bank account out of fear that she has no assets of her own. She then hires Shannon as her producer. Shannon improves her content but also grows close to the family. Secretly, Shannon intends to gather evidence against Natalie and Caleb, seducing Caleb as part of her strategy to expose the ranch’s exploitative conditions. She gives Clementine her old phone, which the girl uses to film life behind the scenes.

When Caleb confesses his affair and announces he wants to leave, Natalie confronts Shannon, who tells Natalie that her family is a business, not a home, and that her children will never forgive her for raising them this way. Natalie physically assaults Shannon in retaliation. Doug devises a plan to buy Shannon’s silence. Shannon instead files a lawsuit and gives a prime-time television interview, presenting behind-the-scenes footage, including video Clementine secretly recorded, that exposes the gulf between Online Natalie and the real woman. Caleb tells Natalie that Doug wants to have her killed to undo the scandal. Natalie’s mother, meanwhile, confesses that she cheated on Natalie’s father years ago, causing him to leave. Natalie responds angrily, to which her mother accuses her of being unkind.

In the present-tense timeline, Natalie follows a trail into the woods and finds a log cabin marked “MANOSPHERE” that has a truck parked outside, a framed photo of her family, and a mini-fridge. Inside, a man introduced to Natalie as one of the Mills’ neighbors sits peeling grocery store stickers off vegetables. Seeing Natalie, he blurts, “Mama.” Natalie runs off and ends up back at the ranch. Clementine, now a fully grown adult woman, arrives in a Subaru.

Part 3 reveals that after the scandal of Shannon’s exposé, Natalie and Caleb voluntarily regressed into pioneer-era living on their own ranch, hiding away from the world. Clementine escaped home at 16 with four of her siblings, leaving only the toddler, Mary, behind. Mary, the baby Natalie was pregnant with in Part One, is now a teenager raised since infancy to believe she lives in 1855. Natalie and Caleb had three more children, Maeve, Abel, and Noah, born and raised entirely in the primitive setting. Maeve has developmental disabilities stemming from a traumatic homebirth during which she was born blue and revived by eight-year-old Mary. Caleb maintained the illusion by visiting a hidden cabin to watch television and collect grocery-store food supplied by his older sons, Samuel and Stetson. When Natalie asserts that she is supposed to be pregnant, Clementine reveals Natalie is already 50 years old and experiencing menopause.

Clementine uses a legal warrant to take custody of her four youngest children. She refuses to let Natalie come. Left alone, Natalie and Caleb acknowledge they hate each other. Together, they resolve to walk away from the ranch.

The epilogue is set five years later. Natalie, now serving a 30-year prison sentence for aggravated child abuse, is brought to the ranch for a televised interview with Reena Magliotti, her former college roommate turned news anchor. Reena presents Natalie with a copy of The Book of Mary, Mary’s forthcoming memoir. Mary writes about growing up on the ranch, the day Clementine appeared to rescue her, and her life now in Santa Monica with her siblings. The memoir excerpt closes with Mary gripping Clementine’s hand, opening her eyes, and smiling.