A widow, a brass container of ashes, and a yoga retreat in Sicily that changes everything.

Margot is seventy-two and has been carrying her husband for eighteen months — not just his ashes, but the weight of fifty-one years of marriage and the impossible question of who she is without him.

Sicily is supposed to provide answers. A beautiful place to scatter him. A peaceful yoga retreat to find closure.

What she gets instead: a villa under construction, a nun with a flask, an influencer mid-breakdown, a married couple barely speaking, a therapist who's forgotten how to feel, and a cast of strangers who are all, in their own spectacular ways, falling apart.

But Sicily has a way of cracking people open.

Over seven days of volcano hikes, baroque churches, too much pasta, one unforgettable penis bar, and a mysterious woman in black who appears wherever grief gathers, Margot discovers that letting go doesn't mean forgetting. That carrying someone can become love instead of burden. And that family sometimes shows up in the most unexpected forms.

Funny, heartbreaking, and deeply human, The Burning Mountain is a novel about grief and grace, transformation and terrible jokes, and what happens when twelve strangers let an island made of fire change them forever.

Perfect for listeners who loved Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and A Man Called Ove.