Why Everyone Is Suddenly Reading Yesteryear?

Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is one of those debut novels you suddenly start seeing everywhere: on the Tube, in bookshops, in the hands of slightly sleep-deprived women in cafés. Published by Fourth Estate, the book became buzzy long before release, partly because the premise is so culturally on-the-nose it almost sounds invented by the algorithm itself.

First, I was sold by the fact that Anne Hathaway acquired the rights and is set to star in the adaptation. Then a bookseller at local Waterstones completely sealed it with: “Oh, Yesteryear? Everyone’s picking it up at the moment.”

The premise: a “proper” Christian influencer tradwife films herself baking pies from scratch with her five children, quietly loathes her insufferable rich husband — born with a silver spoon and a politician father — and builds a media empire with millions of followers and endless merch drops. She’s surrounded by nannies, producers, and invisible labour, but conveniently leaves all of that out for her Mormon audience. Her followers either idolise her or despise her. She, meanwhile, seems to despise absolutely everyone around her.

Then suddenly she finds herself in 1855, on the very same farm — except the children seem somehow wrong, and her husband has started hitting her. There’s no way out. All that’s left is shovelling manure, baking bread, and occasionally stumbling across traces of her former life (a microphone? evidence of child vaccinations?).

The “perfect” life doesn’t even attempt to hold together. It immediately starts cracking apart across every timeline, as the author throws us between the woman’s past, present, and future while she slowly unravels.

What makes the book unexpectedly good is that beneath all the tradwife satire, time travel, Mormon aesthetics and horror, it’s actually saying something painfully accurate about modern womanhood. About performance and audience. About how femininity today is simultaneously hyper-visible and completely invisible at the same time. Sci-fi or a Black Mirror-style dystopia, but really it’s much closer to a psychological thriller.

The protagonist is awful, hilarious, narcissistic, exhausted, manipulative and weirdly sympathetic all at once. At certain points, the book becomes so absurd it’s genuinely funny, and then suddenly deeply bleak. You never fully know where it’s going next. And without giving too much away, there’s also a queer undercurrent running through the novel that quietly destabilises the entire fantasy of the “perfect” heterosexual family the heroine is trying to sell online.

What Burke understands very well is that the tradwife phenomenon was never really about bread-making or vintage dresses. It’s about women trying to survive inside systems that still fundamentally dislike female autonomy — whether that system is Mormonism, influencer culture, marriage, capitalism or motherhood.

Sharp, compulsively readable, properly bingeable. For some reason, books that genuinely grip me like this have become strangely rare lately.

9/10