Excerpt from California by Edan Lepucki, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There were no windows, so the house was dark, but it was surprisingly cool, like a basement. They could open the door for light and air, Sandy explained.

In the middle of the room two mismatched couches faced each other. The setup reminded Frida of a rundown rec center or a home for the elderly gone sadder than expected. Someone had built smaller chairs for the kids, but they looked about as comfortable as birds' nests: twiggy and sharp. On the rudimentary wooden table nearby, Frida counted two oil lanterns and half a dozen candles.

With Garrett still on her hip, Sandy moved toward the kitchen area. It was just a stone fire pit, and a trashed card table. No chairs. Bo had built shelving into the walls, and on these the family's dishes and tools were crowded. Frida took note of the plastic tarps, folded on the bottom shelf. She wondered if the house leaked.

"We do most of our cooking outside, or we eat raw," Bo said. "Smoke from the fire pit in here won't kill us—there's a chimney of sorts—but we could've designed it better."

Sandy smiled. "I hope you're hungry. We've got rabbit, just need to put it on the fire."

Frida squeezed Cal's hand; she couldn't remember the last time they'd eaten meat.

"We use snares," Bo said, and Cal said he'd love to learn more.

Bo offered to show them the root cellar next and the outhouse and their new underground shed, where they were doing their curing.

Despite his initial austerity, Bo treated Frida and Cal with a tenderness that seemed Southern. He often used their names when speaking to them, as if his conversation were a gift. "You see, Calvin," he would say, "snares can be difficult to build, but they're quite efficient." Like his wife, Bo wore a gold band on his left ring finger. So they'd been out here awhile, Frida thought, long before the world really went to shit. Hilda and Dada had given Frida their rings as a wedding present, but she and Cal had sold them not long after.

"You two married?" Sandy had asked her at the creek. No wonder.

With the Millers, Frida felt like she'd fallen asleep and awoken in a bygone era. They could have been pioneers, hitching their covered wagons, staking claim on a new frontier. Manifest destiny bullshit. Or the opposite: with Bo and Sandy, the land outside wasn't wild and uncharted, something to fear until conquered. No, the earth was to be respected. Only then would it collaborate with you, tell you what it needed and what it was willing to give. And it was willing to give you a lot, if you knew how to ask. It was a lesson in coaxing.

After they'd eaten a meal so succulent and satisfying Frida could have moaned with pleasure, Sandy asked her to follow her back into the house. The men had begun to discuss how to handle larger predators and keep the deer away from food storage and scare off the rare bear that skulked the grounds. Bo had once seen a mama bear and her cubs at the edge of the land; "Imagine if I'd been near them," he was telling Cal. "They're just animals and I've got a gun, but still, I'm not stupid. They scare me." It was a conversation Frida thought she should be involved in, but what the hell, she could get a distilled version from Cal on the walk back to the shed. She wished Sandy and Bo would invite them to stay over, but she knew they wouldn't. Already, Bo had made it clear that they would not be seeing one another all the time. "There's always work to be done," he'd said during lunch.

Sandy had grabbed Frida's hand as they walked into the house. It was as dry as Frida's own, her knuckles white and flaky. "I guess you won't be lending me any lotion," she said, nodding at their intertwined hands.

"I wish. I'm dry as an old lake bed. But I did want to show you this."

Excerpted from California by Edan Lepucki. Copyright © 2014 by Edan Lepucki. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.