Excerpt from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The babies fall into a tear-stained slumber, so exhausted that they may even bless their frazzled mothers by sleeping through the night. In the bodies of the teenage girls who are not yet mothers the blood arrives. One native son sneezes, another has an orgasm. A teenage boy pops a pimple. A toenail falls off. The carpenter slides the board into place. In Miss Hazel Williams’s parlor, the piano student strikes a B-natural. At St. David’s, Eustace Craven finally succeeds in moving his bowels. The dead sigh and look to the place where Llewellyn will be buried, right over there, next to the unoccupied bit of earth that has been reserved for his wife. Cenotaphs are such a waste of real estate.

The rain comes and soaks the ground. Cool and clean, it is a great relief to all concerned. The dead get back to work. They barely registered Hope’s presence, so few of them notice that she has already, once again, gone missing.

And above the field that has been in Llewellyn Dewey Jones’s family for over a century, three birds, all native to Nebraska but of disparate species, are traveling earthward on a cold downdraft. After uttering a few words to one another—too quickly for the dead ornithologist fathers to translate—they fly off in different directions. No one notices Llewellyn’s Titleist 100, bearing a crescent-shaped cut on one side, looking like a partially peeled exotic fruit. It continues to arc up into the sky until it disappears.

It does not come down.

Excerpted from Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos. Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Kallos. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.