Excerpt from The Age of Perpetual Light by Josh Weil, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
The Age of Perpetual Light

I'm behind the barn, splitting burnwood, when I see the bear coming for our daughter. It's December, dusk. At my back: high piles of cut rounds. Out in the field: the bucked trees stacked, their drag marks dark in all the snow, the pines looking almost black beyond. And between their trunks: a patch of true black moving. Everything else is still—the stone wall, the glass greenhouse, the sledding hill behind our home, packed hard by the weight of my wife and daughter gone down run after run—except a spot of orange: Orly in her snowsuit. Rolling snow boulders. Down by the old stone wall at the edge of the woods. Beneath the splitter's rumble, the shaking of the pine boughs is a silent ripple washing steadily towards her.

For a second I can feel her in my hands—the heft of her when I first pick her up, my arms strained with her struggling—and then it's just the log again and Orly is out there, suddenly standing straight up, staring into the trees. Her hands are bare—she will not suffer gloves, shucks mittens as soon as she thinks she's out of sight—her fingers stained so bright by markers I can see them slowly curling towards her palms. She takes a snowsuit-stiffened step. Another. The first time we zipped her into the hunter's camouflage, I crouched down, winked. Hey bub, I said, get me a beer, eh? Bess laughed. But Orly only asked, Who's Bub? And when I poked her bright orange belly with a wriggly finger, my wife said, Ev, the way I knew meant Stop.

Excerpted from The Age of Perpetual Light by Josh Weil. Copyright © 2017 by Josh Weil. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.