Search Worlds Without End

Mary and Eddie are meant for each other—but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon, a sorcerer's car will speed down Mary's street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls. Kathryn Davis, an author the Chicago Tribune called "one of the most inventive novelists at work today," has created here a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex—that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time—there's no telling where you might come out.

Part mystery, part domestic meditation and part horror story, ""Hell" is Davis's tour de force." (Joy Press, "The Village Voice.") In her brilliantly eerie third novel, three households coexist in a single restless vision.

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf immerses us in the lives of two women in a small upstate New York town-a single mother of twin daughters who waits tables (despite her privileged background) and the elderly Danish composer who she brefriends. At the heart of their peculiar friendship is a Hans Christian Andersen tale (the subject of the composer's final opera) about a prideful girl who is damned for using a loaf of bread, intended as a gift for her parents, as a stepping stone.

In a thin place, according to legend, the membrane separating this world from the spirit world is almost nonexistent. The small New England town of Varennes is such a place, and Kathryn Davis transports us there, revealing a surprising pageant of life as, in the course of one summer, Varennes's tranquility is shattered by the arrival of a threatening outsider, worldly and otherworldly forces come into play, and a young local girl finds her miraculous gift for resurrecting the dead tested by the conflict between logic and wish.