Excerpt from All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She moves as quickly as she can to the cave entrance and ties one end of the rope to the iron bar, then hammers the bar into the earth with a stone until she believes it will hold her weight. After one last tug on the rope, she steps gingerly into the mouth of the cave and begins the steep descent.

Once she has reached the floor, the opening to the cave blazes above her like a jagged red sun, but around her all is cool and dim. The lantern light does not go far in darkness this profound, but by moving around the perimeter of the space she soon gains its measure.

At one end of the room she finds a tunnel, big enough to scuttle through at a crouch, and decides to see where it leads. As she goes farther, the passage angles steeply downward and grows narrower, until there is barely room for her to crawl and none to turn around. She has a sudden urge to stand up, though she knows she can't. The stone floor cuts against her knees. She has no sense of how far she has come, and for all she knows the tunnel might end in a blank wall, and if it does, she will have to crawl the whole way backward, if she can even do such a thing. The panic makes her muscles twitch; she has to force herself to pause and breathe deeply to stay her own frantic motion. She imagines she is at home, in the little corner of the house where they store the potatoes, where the earthen walls squeeze close around her. At last she is calmer and moves forward again, and soon the tunnel widens out into another room. Sadie stands and stretches, claps her hands. To her right the sound echoes back, quick and sharp, but to the left it fades away into nothing. She sings out a line from her favorite hymn, "Glory, glory, praise His name," and the stone walls sing back to her in a weird chorus. Laughing, she sings to the end of the song and holds her breath as the echoes fade. This is her reward for pushing herself forward when she might have turned back. She has never been anywhere so strange and apart from the world. It feels as though this place belongs to her alone, and before she has even begun the crawl back up through the tunnel, she knows she will return.

Excerpted from All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva. Copyright © 2018 by Anjali Sachdeva. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.