Excerpt from Tender by Belinda McKeon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Catherine had run off as quickly as she could, pleading some obligation or other, and she had sat for a long moment afterwards,staring at the phone, at the cord pulled through from the hall, at the plump, cheerful-looking digits on the buttons, her head feeling as though it was pulsing in and out of something unreal. Ten she had gone into the sitting room, where her mother was watching television with Anna, Catherine's six-year-old sister, and she had been unable even to look at either of them, worrying about what could happen to them now, because of what she and James had done. Which was the height of paranoia, of course it was, but James had had an answer for that too, the next night, when she described to him the stress he had gone through. And it was true. It didn't make it any less real, all of that; that she thought they were being paranoid didn't make it any less real at all. Catherine had not been able to change the subject quickly enough, that night, to get onto something that was not dangerous, and she did not want to think about it now, either. She did not want to think about it anytime. She wanted lemonade, which was what James had gone into the house for, glasses of cold lemonade for the two of them, and he would be back out with them now, she thought, squinting up at the sunlight; he would be back out any minute. Te glasses would be gorgeously cool, would be glistening with ice, and Catherine would sit up on the blanket to see James as he came towards her from the house, and you desperate wee shite, she would call out to him, and he would pretend to scowl at her, stepping through the metal archway his mother had set down at the edge of the lawn. Roses—or at least Catherine thought they were roses—were trained up the archway, a vivid red against the paintwork, and now she heard him; she heard, close to the patio door and now coming across the driveway, his footsteps, and yes, there it was, the ice, the clinking, and Catherine clenched all the muscles of her arms and her shoulders and her thighs, just for the pleasure of it, just for the loveliness of releasing them again, stretching out on the blanket so that her fingers and toes touched the grass now, its cool, clipped pile. She sighed, as the sun bleached white the world shut out by her eyelids, and once again she tried to train her vision--was it still vision if your eyes were closed?--on one of the tiny black foaters swirling in and out of view. But therew was no holding them; they came and went like birds.

Tis was her second day in Carrigfinn.

Excerpted from Tender by Darragh McKeon. Copyright © 2016 by Darragh McKeon. Excerpted by permission of Lee Boudreaux Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.