Excerpt from Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Inside the cover was a tightly controlled cursive note; a translation of the title, in Esther's mother's perfect hand. "Remember," her mother had written to herself in English: "The path provides the natural next step."

Esther's stepmother, Cecily, had given her this novel when she was eighteen, the day before she'd left home forever, and at the time Esther had needed the translation. Spanish should have been her mother tongue, but Isabel had died when Esther was too young for language, and so it was only her mother's tongue. But it was the Spanish title she'd gotten tattooed across her collarbones several months later: "la ruta nos aportó" on the right, "otro paso natural" on the left. A palindrome and thus readable in the mirror.

The party felt like it had been hours ago, though the sweat from dancing was still drying on Esther's skin. She had stripped down to only a black tank top; now she was shivering. In the glass, she could see the words of her tattoo around the straps of her shirt. When she'd first gotten the ink, she had just fled her home and family and been feeling adrift and frightened in a world that suddenly lacked any kind of structure, so the mere suggestion of a path, much less a natural next step, had been infinitely soothing to her. But now that she was nearing thirty, spoke excellent Spanish, and most importantly had actually read the novel, she understood that Gil's title was not meant to be soothing at all. Rather, it spoke of a kind of preordained movement, a socially constructed pathway that forced people, particularly women, into a series of steps they'd been tricked into believing they'd chosen for themselves.

These days the words struck her as a rallying cry: not to follow the path, but to veer from it. In fact, this very phrase had helped her make the decision to ignore her father's long-ago orders and stay in Antarctica for the summer season.

A decision she was now terrified she might come to regret.

"Leave every year on November 2," he had said, "or the people who killed your mother will come for you, too. And not only you, Esther. They'll come for your sister."

For these past ten years, she had listened, she had obeyed. Every November 1 she had packed up her things and every November 2 she had started moving, sometimes driving for that long day and night, sometimes taking a series of buses, planes, trains, not sleeping. From Vancouver to Mexico City. From Paris to Berlin. From Minneapolis to Antarctica. Every year, like clockwork, except this year. This year she had ignored his warning. This year she had stayed.

And now it was November 5, the station was filled with strangers, and one of them had brought a book.

Excerpted from Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs. Copyright © 2023 by Emma Torzs. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.