Excerpt from Academy Street by Mary Costello, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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In the dark she is counting sheep, like Claire told her to do. It is no good, she cannot sleep. She starts to count all the days since she was born, but it is too hard. She tries to remember every single day, every single minute with her mother. Suddenly, there is a loud bang. She sits up, terrified. She hears dogs barking in the distance. Maeve does not stir in her bed across the room. Then everything is silent again. She listens out for sounds in the house. A big bright moon is shining into the room, making everything white, even the floorboards. Mellow the moonlight. When the woman comes on the wireless singing this song, her mother sings along. There's a form at the casement, a form of her true love. And he whispered with face bent, I'm waiting for you love. Tess meant to ask her mother what a casement was, and a form. Her mother said there is a man in the moon and Tess kneels up on her bed now and looks out the window, turning her head this way and that, trying to make out his face.

In the morning before it is fully bright she wakes up. She listens out for Oliver. And then she remembers and a sick feeling comes over her. Early each morning last summer the little birds used to sing, huddled together under the roof above her window. Now they are all gone; their wings and tiny hearts are grown up. She closes her eyes, tries to go back to sleep. The house is so quiet she thinks everyone might be gone and she is the only one left. She pulls the blankets up to her chin to keep out the cold.

She sits up, looks across at Maeve sleeping. She gets out of bed and runs over to the big window, hardly feeling the floor under her. The sky is gray and low, everything still asleep. She looks out across the lawn, then far off over the fields. Her father is coming over a hill, in his long coat, with a gun on his shoulder. He is carrying dead rabbits. He comes nearer and nearer. She has never seen him like this, so lonely.

Excerpted from Academy Street by Mary Costello. Copyright © 2015 by Mary Costello. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.