Ring of Salt: Finding home and hope on the Wild Coast of Ireland

Betsy Cornwell left home with her baby on his first birthday, checking into a hotel under a false name so her husband could not track them down. Over the long months of housing insecurity that followed, bouncing around cheap motel rooms and friends' couches, Betsy's determination to offer her son something she'd never had—a safe, stable home—took on the force of obsession.

In The Old Knitting Factory, Cornwell invites readers to join her on the path that led out of her violent marriage and into renovating a run-down house on a lake in rural Ireland. She transforms a largely abandoned and abused vacation house into a family home and childcare-inclusive arts retreat space for other single parents. Along the way, she creates community and finds family wherever she goes—even when she has to build it herself, brick by brick.

Mixing Maid's gripping portrait of single motherhood's precarity with The Salt Path's wild, romantic sense of place—in this case among rural Ireland's cool mists, nubbly Aran yarns, and whispering turf fires—The Old Knitting Factory invites readers to experience the magic of found family and new beginnings.