The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters - Tapa blanda

Abandoned by their mother after their father's suicide, Lily and Mabel live on their own in their grandmother's old junk shop in rural Nebraska. They are bonded by their loyalty to each other-and by their urgent desire to reconcile their own versions of the past. In what she means to be a rebellious act, Lily steals a car with her boyfriend and heads southwest to confront her mother. Mabel stays behind, hoping to commune somehow with her father's ghost...in a textured, eccentric, and redemptive tale as spare and compelling as the Nebraska landscape.

Timothy Schaffert is editor-in-chief of The Reader, Omaha's alternative newsweekly.