Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"That bad?" Dr. Sprague asked, then, "I told you."

"Hard to say," said Bertha Truitt. She wanted to dally. Her belief in phrenology was draining from her, she could feel it spin down the drain. And yet: as her fingers circumnavigated Dr. Sprague's skull, she did know him, there was no way to know him but through his head. She hadn't taken off her kid gloves, a mistake she recognized as her little finger grazed the apex of his ear. So she removed them, tucked one in each armpit. She worked the ambits of his skull. He was kind, and lackadaisical, devoted, careless. He was melancholy. He liked to drink (this she determined from the smell of sweet ferment coming through all parts of him). He would do anything for her, to the best of his abilities. He would love and disappoint her.

"Now you," he said, and doffed his gloves.

She pulled the pins from her hair. Maybe this was really how you read somebody. You applied your head to that person's fingertips, and the person poured themselves into your brain, chin, neck, shoulders—and you knew everything. She stared at his shoes (good brown brogues, one toe scuffed across the perforations) and felt the mechanism of her soul flutter and falter. He was unconvinced, but what if her skull revealed her to be venal or petty or dumb? He was not touching her as though he believed her to be venal, petty, dumb. She closed her eyes. The two living people touched only fingertip to scalp; the dead beneath them lay foot to foot and head to head.

"All right," he said at last.

She opened her eyes, squared her shoulders. His lopsided mustache twitched fondly. "You needn't have taken your hair down," he said, plucking the pins from her hand. She felt the heat of his forearms against her neck, through his jacket, as he tacked her hair back up. She could tell it was a bad, tender job.

She was not beautiful, thought Dr. Leviticus Sprague. Not in the way he had been raised to think of beauty. Her skin was custard. Her hair was the color of bruised fruit. Her face looked like an anthology of other faces: an odd nose with a bump halfway down its slope, a thick upper lip that cast a shadow over its thinner downstairs neighbor. Narrow chin. Broad forehead. Even her eyes were mismatched, the right one bigger, prone to widening to show the white all around the iris, he would never stop noticing. It always made his heart chime.

He had been alone a long while. He had never lived with a woman he was not related to—his grandmother, his mother, his sister—which is to say he had never been regarded the way this woman, this Bertha Truitt, regarded him, with an ardent curiosity. In his way he had loved her not from the moment he saw her in the frost but from the moment she had looked at him and he understood she might love him back. Love him back came first: he was a cave, happy to be a cave, and she a swung lantern come to light him up. When he'd heard her tell the policeman her name, he'd thought she was lying: she'd read it off some headstone. But he'd walked the cemetery a dozen times since then, and never found a single Truitt. The unsteady boy with whom he'd found her had gone. He could not go to the Salford Hospital to ask what had happened to her, not because he would be turned away as a visitor but as a doctor. He would not ask.

But here she was. She was so odd. Mismatched in her soul, and pleased with the effect.

"It's a humbug," he said. "A lie, start to finish."

"But tell me your findings."

She would always be stubborn in the face of his reason. He would always surrender.

He said, "I could not find a single flaw."

"Do you bowl?" she asked him.

He laughed then, with his whole head. She wouldn't have known he was a laughing man. "Well," he said. "I have bowled."

"I mean candlepins."

He nodded. Candlepins existed also in Oromocto, New Brunswick, Canada, where he was from. An elegant sport, he'd thought when he'd watched it, and like most elegant things that white people favored also essentially feebleminded.

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.