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What do we owe our family and friends in times of wild uncertainty?
That's the question the women of Leyna Krow's beguiling, darkly fabulist story collection grapple with as they strive to be good mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, wives, and companions in a world that is constantly shifting around them. Set in the Pacific Northwest, these stories blend high concept magic with the sometimes subtle, other times glaring, realities of climate change.
As protagonists contend with doppelgänger babies, hordes of time travelers, mysterious portals, and supernatural siblings, there lurks in the background the effects of the region's rapidly shifting environment. There are wildfires, wind storms, unrelenting heat, disrupted butterfly migration patterns, a new plague, and a catastrophe on the slopes of Mount Rainier that reverberates through three generations of a single family over the course of a half dozen linked stories.
With Krow's signature blend of sardonic whimsy and unsettling insight, Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids imagines the rules to be broken, choices to be made, and even crimes to be had for the sake of the people, and places, we love.
"In this trenchant collection from Krow, uncanny moments punctuate the characters' day-to-day realities ... Krow's bracing and curious stories reveal what gets lost in the quest for perfection." —Publishers Weekly
"Krow explores forest fires, volcanoes, time travel, and the lives of octopuses with verve and wit ... Even in the midst of familial or environmental tragedies, Krow's prose maintains a playful spirit." —Kirkus Reviews
"This book doesn't just entertain—it explodes. Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids balances unearthly happenings with those concretely upon us. Krow deftly pulls readers into her tilted universe through the veneer of domesticity. Once there, we are haunted by something far more absurd than babies who become men in nine weeks and supplements that turn women into werewolves—a natural world that cries for our attention and goes unheard. Krow writes with both a masterful weirdness and the wise compassion of a human who loves our beautiful Earth." —Emily Habeck, national bestselling author of Shark Heart: A Love Story
"Leyna Krow's Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids is beguiling and beautiful, funny and poignant, and mesmerizing at every turn. These strange stories have a delightful wildness about them: they turn our everyday world askew so as to reveal complicated truths beneath the surface. Leyna Krow is the perfect storyteller for this moment, for she so deftly captures the brutality and absurdity of living in what often feels like the end of the world." —Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of California
"A gorgeous book that also serves as a series of unanswerable, probing questions: How did we get here? How will we move forward? Can we still love, despite the wreckage? This is devastating work, and I mean that as a compliment. Very rarely have I come across a set of stories so genuinely moving. A searing collection that attempts to place the world delicately in our fumbling, undeserving hands." —Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth
This information about Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Murray Krow
Leyna Krow is the author of the short story collection I'm Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking, which was a Believer Book Award finalist. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband and two children.
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