FICTION | AVAILABLE AUGUST 2025
THINGS I DIDN'T DO
A Novel
by KARIN ANDERSON
"Reading Things I Didn't Do makes me wish for more stories that faithfully get at what it means to be human."
—CRAIG LANCASTER, Northward Dreams
What makes us who we are? Things I Didn’t Do is tour-de-force of character—an intimate and epic reckoning with past, place, and the people who shape the course of our lives.
It was the day that changed Ryder Mikkelson’s life: the day he fell from a loaded pack mule high in the Book Cliffs of eastern Utah. He was seven years old, and some things would never quite be the same. The way he walks. How he rides a horse. The way he looks at a family photograph. Things I Didn’t Do is both the story of a lifetime and the story of how we make our lives. In writing that is fiercely intimate and expansively lyrical, this novel explores the experiences and revelations that—in a single moment—can change our understanding of ourselves, shift how we relate to the people around us, and reverberate far into the future.
August 2025 | Fiction | Trade Paper Original | Trim: 5.25 x 8” | ISBN: 979-8-89092-026-3 | $18.95 | 364 pp
“Brimming with astonishing insight into humanity’s knotted capacity for folly and dignity.”
—KATHLEEN BLACKBURN, Loose of Earth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KARIN ANDERSON is the award-winning author of What Falls Away and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. She is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, and self-described heretic, as well as the co-editor of the acclaimed anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild. A former professor of English at Utah Valley University, Anderson holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah. She hails from the Great Basin and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
PRAISE FOR THINGS I DIDN'T DO
“Karin Anderson’s Things I Didn’t Do is more than just the story of Ryder Mikkelson, a boy who doesn’t see, touch, or understand the world the way most of us do. Rather, it is capital-L life, presented in prose that both shimmers and goes about its work unburdened by affectation. In Ryder’s life—despite his constraints, or maybe because of them—we can see our own and those of the people we love: how the expectations of others impose on us, how friends and family are simultaneously shelter and storm, and how getting from here to there is often a matter of degree, not distance. All the while, Anderson’s deft storytelling and deep heart guide us through, with sly, poignant observations that land delightfully on the mark.”
—CRAIG LANCASTER, two-time High Plains Book Award winner & author of Northward Dreams
“Things I Didn’t Do weaves a poignant tale of family, resilience, and the quiet beauty of the West Desert. I didn’t think I could love Things I Didn’t Do more than Karin Anderson’s last novel, but I do. This story has some- thing special for everyone, but folks from Utah will find moments to recognize and cherish on every page.”
—ANNE HOLMAN, The King’s English Bookshop co-owner
“Anderson again shows new, irreducible ways of seeing the American West. Daring, lithe, and mesmerizing, Things I Didn’t Do balances how quickly one’s life can tumble into a ravine of uncertainty with the ever- lasting bonds securing us to place and people. Conjuring bear, shape- shifters, river chasms, and abandoned mines, Anderson ushers us into her reimagined Utah where one man’s restive search for belonging kept me reading late into the night. Things I Didn’t Do brims with astonish- ing insight into humanity’s knotted capacity for folly and dignity. I am in awe of the limitless power of Anderson’s prose, which captures both beauty and terror with such precision it will leave readers—just as it has left me—changed.”
—KATHLEEN BLACKBURN, Loose of Earth
"In Anderson’s powerful command of voice, rural Utah itself is a character, its spare, sometimes harsh landscape lovingly described in the language of the people who inhabit it."
—CATHERINE WELLER, Weller Book Works owner
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
WHAT FALLS AWAY: A Novel
Cassandra Soelberg, pregnant at seventeen, was cast out of her community by religious leaders. Returning to her rural Utah hometown after nearly forty years to care for her senile mother, she meets a young man with an uncanny resemblance to the father of the child she was forced to give up for adoption. Drawn back into traumatic scenes of young adulthood, she must reconcile with her past in the fiercely beautiful landscapes that shaped her. What Falls Away is a stunning novel about family, art, and the raw process of healing.
“Sharp, poetic prose... her story commands attention.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
BEFORE US LIKE A LAND OF DREAMS
Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.
“A narrative extravaganza that ponders the bristled roots of ancestry, unbroken by time or place, and the muddled truths and fallacies of family history that inform who we believe we are. This masterwork flouts expectations.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS (starred review)
BLOSSOM AS THE CLIFFROSE: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild
Blossom as the Cliffrose features original poems and prose by talented writers who are faithful, non-faithful, believers, heretics, converts and de-converts, dragged in or forced out of the Mormon faith. This dynamic collection demonstrates the breadth, complexity, and diversity of a Latter-day Saint legacy of commitment to natural place and challenges us to examine the myriad ways our own deeply rooted heritage shapes our personal relationship with landscape.
“Meditative and energizing, fierce and loving, balanced and rhythmic. An invitation to welcome faith and nature, and to embrace the tensions and beauty that spring from every crack and cranny along the way.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
