Ligatures

Stanza Thompson knows how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but she can't read the signs of the times. Not, at least, until the witching hour. Stanza is a young American scholar working in Belgium when her husband, Pierre, is killed in a tragic bicycle accident. Devastated by her soul mate's death, she moves back to her family home in rural Kansas.

In her five-year absence, Stanza's homeland - and especially her hometown - has become darkly twisted, creating something dangerously inhospitable to outsiders. As rebellious as she is brilliant, Stanza is a stranger in the university where she teaches, even in the town where she was born and raised. With ghosts and feral hounds as companions, she stumbles upon a carving in the woods that harkens back to Ozark magic, promising to single out and kill a witch. This discovery sends Stanza on a tornadic quest into regional folklore, a string of historical murders, and the occult - and ultimately, into the mysteries of her own bloody heritage and fey destiny.

Composed of idiosyncratic characters and idiomatic prose, Ligatures combines elements of the weird, Southern Gothic, and magical realism to create a world that is familiar and terrifying at once. Between the suspense and the quality of writing, you won't be able to put down this spellbinding first novel, even long after it's finished. Reviewers have called Ligatures "perceptive" with a "dimensional and complicated" protagonist that "brings to mind the early work of Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood."