The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

Lily and Mabel find themselves on their own, living in their grandmother's antique shop in rural Nebraska. They're bound together by their loyalty to each other and by a haunting urgency to reconcile their own, disparate versions of the past so that they might build their futures together. In what she intends to be a rebellious, even wild, choice, Lily steals a car with her boyfriend and heads southwest--imitating the flight of the infamous Stark brothers but without the violent crime spree--toward an Arizona vineyard to confront her mother. But Mabel stays behind, seeking to commune somehow with her father's ghost and finding solace from a young man whose family is grieving the death of a sister.

Renowned author Timothey Schaffert's celebrated debut novel, reissued here in an entirely new paperback edition, chronicles two sisters on the cusp of womanhood as they struggle to understand their father's suicide as well as their mother's abandonment of them many years earlier. On graduating from high school, the sisters are once again set adrift, this time by their grandmother, who leaves them for Florida. In order to survive, and perhaps ven thrive, on their path to adulthood, they must learn to reconcile their pasts and discover how to depend upon themselves as well as upon each other.