This afternoon reading has aspects of the nearby and faraway, with Missoula-based novelist Deirdre McNamer cast in the ‘nearby’ role and Dublin writer Sue Rainsford joining us from over the Atlantic. This should be a delight, as it gives readers a welcome, long-anticipated return by Deirdre McNamer, she of such favorites as Rima in the Weeds (for which she visited Elliott Bay thirty years ago), now with her newest, Aviary (Milkweed Editions).

“Where would we be without the always magnificent Deirdre McNamer? With Aviary, she has given us her best work yet, a novel brimming, room after room, with all our mercies and our hauntings. This is a house you want to explore forever, where the smallest acts can be as potent as revelations, and where we, on every beautiful, hilarious, and heart-heavy page, learn a little bit more about ourselves. I didn't want to leave it―a book I will return to, often, for faith, for light.”―Paul Yoon. There is mystery here.

Sue Rainsford has a brand-new novel that is just out in the UK - Redder Days -but  alas, not out yet, or soon, in the US, as of this writing. Her debut  novel, Follow Me to Ground (Scribner), was published here to high praise a year ago. 

“Refreshingly, the novel disregards the predilections of contemporary literary fiction and instead veers toward allegory…What’s best in the novel is its idiosyncratic vision of the meaning of girlhood and first love…The tale pulses with images of opening and entering, into the ground, into patients’ bodies, in sexual union. The suggestion is that a teenage crush is an experience of haunting and being haunted, and that maturity comes through a process of utter, ruinous self-absorption.” —New York Times Book Review.

"Sue Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground is a triumph of imagination and myth-bending—a weird, tender, haunted and deeply affecting spectacle, equal parts beauty and horror, and unlike anything you will read this year."—Téa Obreht.

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