Three Moons

A novel built like music – twenty-four movements through a winter landscape.

9 April 2026 ~ 3 min read

There’s a moment in Schubert’s Winterreise, the twenty-third song, where the wanderer looks up and sees three suns in the sky. Two of them set. The third, he says, would do well to follow. It’s the moment in the cycle where everything the listener has been suspecting becomes undeniable, and the music doesn’t explain it. It just holds it.

I’ve been living inside that moment for a long time.

Three Moons is finished. It is a novel about an elderly maple sugar farmer named Colleen — the last holdout in a vanished New England community — who walks into deep winter to find her nephew and is led instead through the landscape of everything she has lost. A whiskey jack (gray jay bird) follows from the first tree. Her sister appears in a dead village, unchanged by the years, leaving no footprints in the snow. Three moons rise — a paraselenae, a real atmospheric phenomenon — and Colleen sees what she has been refusing to see.

The novel is twenty-four chapters, structured in conversation with Schubert’s Winterreise. It compresses its journey into a single day, in the tradition of Joyce’s Ulysses. It is written in close third person, present tense, and it does not leave Colleen’s consciousness until the final page—where it steps outside, just once, into the land and the silence and a gray jay alive in a sugar maple, doing what it does. The bird doesn’t know Colleen exists. The land holds them both with the same indifference.

I grew up in these woods. I studied tracking and nature observation with Tom Brown Jr. I took winter journeys through the forests that form this novel’s landscape. There are still family-owned maple sugar producers in northern New England who practice the old way—hand-drilled taps, hanging buckets, wood-fired evaporators. Substance over style. Quality over quantity. The patience of hands that know the trees.

This novel came from the same place my music comes from. My art song cycle Odusseia includes The Sirens of Dublin, set in the Ormond Hotel pub where Bloom wanders during Joyce’s Ulysses — the same intersection of Homer, Joyce, and music that runs through Three Moons. Schubert’s song cycles have been part of my teaching and my creative life for decades. When I sat down to write a novel about a woman walking through winter, the structure was never a question. It was always going to be Winterreise. Twenty-four movements. One journey. No way home.

The novel sits alongside The Year of Shadows and An Apology to the Cosmos as the third pillar of what I’ve been building—three novels that come at the question of how we endure from completely different directions. A young woman in 1830 Paris. A janitor at the edge of the universe. An old woman in the snow. Different centuries, different genres, the same stubbornness about what matters.

The snow falls. The bird sleeps. The land holds.

~ Liam