ISBN: 978-1-931982-63-4 library binding $26

ISBN: 978-1-931982-64-1 trade paper $14.95

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:

     Robert Day stood in a cloud of dust and surveyed the empty attic. The dust smelled of cypress. Stands of cypress grew along the Pearl River whose banks bordered his front yard. He imagined their feathery tops, their branchless trunks rising smoothly out of the dark water, the polished knees ranged in circles about the parent trees.
     All morning he had carried pieces of broken furniture downstairs; he had opened trunks and boxes, throwing most of what he found into a dumpster. His most valuable discoveries had been a silver fork and three crystal wine glasses.
On leave from his job as a translator, he had recently taken up residence in the house on the Pearl River in Mississippi. Two years ago he had lost his wife Elaine, killed by poachers in Africa. An anthropologist who specialized in the study of chimpanzees, she had gone to Africa to continue her research. One day she did not return from the forest. She had been executed, a single shot in the head. So far the police had not found the people who killed her.
     After the funeral, after he had made the difficult trip to Africa to bring her body back, he found Elaine’s presence inescapable. It weighed him down. It was as if he and their house—a house they had built in the Midwestern town where the university was located—were being slowly ground under by a glacier sliding down from the pole and across the plains. He recalled how a month or so after he learned of her death he found himself reading the draft of a paper Elaine had been working on about aggression in chimpanzees. It was based on her research of several years before. He read only a few paragraphs, wondering as he read why he was reading. Did he think he would find in her paper some sort of explanation for why she was killed?