Ember Penrose Returns to Nine Ashes with THE SLOW ORCHARD

Book Nine in Her Beloved Cozy Fantasy Series

An orchard that won’t be rushed, a festival tradition forty years old, and an elf learning that telling the truth is its own kind of belonging. Now available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

GLADBROOK, IOWA — September 15, 2026 — Cozy fantasy author Ember Penrose has released The Slow Orchard, the ninth novel in her acclaimed Elves of Nine Ashes series. The book is available now in ebook, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon, and in audiobook on Amazon and Audible.

For readers of Legends & Lattes, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, and Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries: a quiet, lived-in cozy fantasy about patience, inheritance, and the way the small elven village of Nine Ashes makes room for someone learning to belong.

Liora has been in Nine Ashes three months when this story begins.

She has inherited her great-aunt Ostyn’s orchard — nineteen rows of apple trees on a slope outside the village, a cottage that still smells like someone else’s dust, and a leather-bound journal of forty years of careful observation. She has learned to prune. She has learned to graft. She is beginning to read the village the way she has begun to read the trees — by hand, by attention, by patience. The bees of Nine Ashes do not sting without reason. The Motherstone on the common hums below sound. The orchard has a corner where the air is warmer than it should be, and Liora has started talking to the trees at night when she thinks no one is listening.

Then the festival committee asks her to press cider, as Ostyn always did — three barrels, the same as every autumn for forty years. Liora’s mouth says “I’ll do my best.” Her hands, on the bark of the Foxwhelps and the Kingston Blacks, know better. The cider apples won’t ripen in time. The press is ready and the fruit is not, and the gap between what the village expects and what the orchard can give has Liora staring at the kitchen ceiling at night, wondering how to say no to a community that has only ever said yes.

What follows is not a story about saving the festival. It is a story about telling the truth — to the village, to the trees, to herself — and discovering that a community held in place by a decades-long tradition is also a community that knows how to hold someone learning to break one. There is a note Liora writes on the back of a piece of wrapping paper from Talenis’s shop. There is a recipe Ostyn left between pages of the journal for years like this. There is a friend named Sylmara who tells stories by firelight. And there are three dozen pies that, when the festival comes, sell in twenty minutes.

A warm, slow, deeply lived-in novel about patience, stewardship, craft, and what it means to belong to a place that is older than you are.

Set in the world of Nine Ashes, the novels can be read in any order — though readers who have visited Nine Ashes before will find familiar faces in the bakery, the forge, the chandlery, and at the edge of the Whisperwood.

Where to Buy

Ebook: $3.99 — Amazon (also free for Kindle Unlimited members)

Paperback: $14.99 — Amazon

Hardcover: $19.95 — Amazon

Audiobook: $3.99 — Amazon and Audible (also free for Audible Plus members)

Buy link: https://amzn.to/4yUsqQA

Kindle Unlimited and Audible Plus members can enjoy The Slow Orchard — and the rest of the Elves of Nine Ashes series — free with membership.

About the Elves of Nine Ashes

The Elves of Nine Ashes is a cozy fantasy series set in the elven village of Nine Ashes, in the world of Aldenmere — a place founded on an old promise of peace and still shaped by it. Each book is a standalone novel following a different resident of the village through a gentle, character-driven arc centered on craft, community, and belonging. There are no villains in Nine Ashes, only neighbors — and magic that moves quietly through ordinary, kind things.

Also in the series:

Book 1: The Weaver’s Thread

Book 2: The Forge and the Flame

Book 3: The Long Road Home

Book 4: Soft Light, Slow Fire

Book 5: The Hum at the Heart

Book 6: The Tea Room at the Bakery

Book 7: What the Plants Are Saying

Book 8: The Bookshop on the Common

About Ember Penrose

Ember Penrose grew up in a small New England town, reading under a particular oak tree she has never stopped thinking about. After a decade spent doing something sensible with her literature degree, she decided sensible was overrated and began writing the stories she actually wanted to read: slow, quiet stories where nobody is chosen, nothing needs saving, and the magic lives in ordinary kindness between neighbors. Nine Ashes, the elven village at the heart of her books, is the town she has always been trying to find. She lives with one elderly cat named Sorrel and a deeply unreasonable herb garden.

Media Contact

Lisa Woodward

We Woodwards Publishing

Email: Lisa@wewoodwards.com