The world is fraying. Art is disappearing. And one woman sets out on the river before everything changes forever.

A few years into the future, society is unraveling. Violence is rising. The aftermath of a devastating pandemic still lingers. And across the country, a phenomenon known only as the Vanishing is causing people and works of art to disappear without explanation.

Cassie Navrone, a widowed retired teacher with silver braids and a restless spirit, takes a job piloting a luxury houseboat called the Silver Lady downriver to its owner. What begins as a long-awaited escape soon becomes something stranger: a journey through a world tilting out of balance.

On board are five fellow travelers—artists, poets, lovers, and drifters—each carrying private griefs, secrets, and reasons for boarding the boat. As the river unfolds, so do eerie landscapes, dreamlike encounters, unsettling towns, pirates, storms, and glimpses of another reality just beyond the visible one.

But as the voyage grows more surreal, Cassie must do more than keep the boat afloat. She must hold together a fragile crew, face the life she left behind, and decide whether the river is carrying them toward safety, transformation…or something they may never fully understand.

Lyrical, strange, and deeply human, Silver Lady is a magical realism novel about survival, reinvention, art, and the mystery waiting around the next bend.

“Sage has crafted a unique near-future, post-pandemic world where Art is vanishing and the world is chaotic. The Silver Lady drifts downriver in a dreamlike state, slipping through time and reality, past and present, in a world with ever-changing rules, making you question what is real…” —Lena Gibson, author of The Edge of Life: Love and Survival During the Apocalypse