Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She blinked to reveal a pair of baize-green eyes and the soul of a middle-aged woman. When she sat up from the frost it was as though a stone bishop had stepped from his niche.

"Hello," she said pleasantly to Dr. Sprague.

"Yes," he said to her.

Then she turned to Joe Wear, who had fished from the gladstone bag a small wooden ball and a narrow wooden pin, and was regarding them, then her, wonderingly.

"Ah good!" she said. "Give here."

He did. She held them like a queen in an ancient painting, orb and scepter. She was alive. She was a bowler.

"A new sort of bowling," she declared.

"Madam," said Dr. Sprague, but Joe Wear said, "Candlepin."

"Of a sort," she said, with a papercut tone. She set the pin and ball on the ground beside her. Then, to Joe, "You're a bowling man."

"Have been. Tenpin. Worked at the Les Miserables house."

From the Avenue of Sorrows a voice called, "Ahoy!" A policeman, a middle-aged anvil-headed man, with gray hair that shone just a little, like hammered aluminum.

"Let us get her to her feet," Dr. Sprague said to Joe Wear, and they pulled her upright as the policeman doddered down the frosty hill on his heels. She left her dead shape behind in the grass, a hay-colored silhouette, as though she'd lain there a long time. The dead grass persisted weeks later, seasons. From the right angle in the Salford Cemetery you might see it still.

"What's your name, missus," the policeman said to the woman, once he'd got there.

She got a thinking look.

"You haven't forgotten."

Still thinking. At last she said in an experimental voice, "Bertha Truitt. Yes, I think so."

"Better get her to a doctor," said Joe Wear.

"I'm a doctor," said Dr. Sprague, and he took her by the hand, where her pulse was, her blood, her bones.

She smiled. She told him confidingly, "There is not a thing wrong with me."

"You were inconscious," said Joe Wear.

"We'll take her to the Salford Hospital," the policeman decided.

Joe Wear couldn't shake the alarm he'd felt upon seeing her in the morning frost, the pleasure when she'd opened her eyes. She had been brought back from the dead. Her nose was now florid with life, her little teeth loosely strung. He wanted to slap the grass from the back of her dark jacket, as though she were a horse.

"But what were you doing here," Dr. Leviticus Sprague asked her.

Poor man. She admired how their hands looked folded together. "Darling sir," she said. "I was dreaming of love."

Our subject is love because our subject is bowling. Candlepin bowling. This is New England, and even the violence is cunning and subtle. It still could kill you. A candlepin ball is small, two and a half pounds, four and a half inches in diameter, a grapefruit, an operable tumor. You heft it in your palm. Candlepin bowling is a game of skill: nobody has ever bowled a perfect string, every pin with every ball, all the way through, till you've knocked down 130 pins in a row, multiplied and transformed by math and bowling into a 300 game. Nobody's got more than five-sixths of the way there. Nobody, in other words, may look upon the face of God.

This is bowling in New England (except Connecticut). A game of purity for former puritans. A game of devotion that will always fail. Tenpin balls (what most people think of when they hear the word bowling) are the size of hissing cartoon bombs. Tenpins are curvy and shaped like clubs. Candlepin balls are handsize. Candlepins are candleshaped. Bertha Truitt's gravestone would eventually read INVENTOR OF CANDLEPIN BOWLING, THE SPORT OF LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, and so she was, no matter what the history books say, if history books care at all for the game of candlepin. Most don't but this one does, being a genealogy.

Maybe somebody else had invented the game first. That doesn't matter. We have all of us invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life.

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.