About the book:
Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments--a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: the Mermaid Lady, who performs in a nightclub fish tank; the building's handyperson, moonlighting as a medium; and an awkwardly charming professor of medieval studies. Fern alone is acquainted with the undead, who pass like troubled clouds through the apartments, humanity mostly lost ages ago. For the determinedly private Alice, Pine Lake seems the perfect place at the edge of the world to hide herself and her daughter--until the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster.
Intent on solving the mystery of this discarded corpse, Fern eagerly puts her encyclopedic knowledge of detective novels to good use while dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother. She soon comes to realize that within the strange tapestry of Pine Lake residents, nothing is ever quite as it seems. Her investigation digs up long-buried secrets, including her mother's, that implicate each of her neighbors . . . and conjures a new one from beyond the grave.
About the author:
Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collections And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Slate, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and cats.
Amber will be in conversation with Rachel Vorona Cote.
Rachel Vorona Cote is the author of TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. She has written essays and criticism for The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Poetry Foundation, and The Washington Post, in addition to various other publications. In a past life, she was ABD at the University of Maryland, where she studied Victorian literature. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.