A bit more than a decade ago, writer Ross McMeekin and his family moved to a suburb just outside Seattle. “The transition was a bit rough,” McMeekin recalls, “as a lot of transitions are—new community, new culture, new grocery stores—and I soon felt inspired to write funny pieces about where I now lived, if only to entertain myself, make myself laugh, and give some levity to the serious mental health difficulties I was experiencing at the time.”

Those jotted-down stories started to snowball, and before he knew it, McMeekin was working on a novel set in a fictional suburb not unlike his own. Published in late May by Thirty West Publishing House, the finished book, Pepperleaf, took McMeekin nearly eight years to write. “That’s with the caveat that I’m a writer who works on multiple pieces at once,” he explains.

Pepperleaf follows a handful of inhabitants of the titular neighborhood as they face life’s challenges, triumphs, tragedies, and unexpected curveballs. Some handle things with grace and others go off the rails, but in the end, the power of human connection outshines all obstacles, leaving the reader with a sense of hope—both for the novel’s characters and themselves.

“Finding meaningful community has become more difficult these days,” McMeekin says. “I hope this novel, in some small way, shows that it can be done, even between people whose differences seem great.”