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

She'd found her man already, of course: Joe Wear, late of the cemetery. She had known from the moment she'd met him that he was a bowler to his very soul. He had that knack for pointless devotion; his body was built on bowling angles.

He'd visited her once in the hospital, had told her, "I won't pinset. I pinset at Les Miserables. I could manage a house." She turned to him with a gleaming expression, bright and greedy and promising as a collection plate. He said, "I never meant to end up in a graveyard. Bowling"—his voice broke, he repaired it—"is what I got."

She hired him on the spot. All during construction he came to the alley, to give advice, to shake Bertha Truitt's hand. Every handshake was a test, he knew. She was a prophet of bowling but she needed other people to love it, too.

"Jeptha Arrison will be the Captain of the Pinbodies," she told him. That was her own word to describe the boys and men who set the candlepins. "Everyone else is yours to hire or fire. Do a good job," she told him, "and one day the alley will come to you."

There was something wrong with Jeptha Arrison—he was minuscule but had an enormous and lopsided head—and Joe Wear wasn't sure he wanted to be joined to him in an alley wedding. There was something wrong with Joe Wear, too, but he knew how things worked. Everywhere else women bowled behind a curtain, to protect their modesty, to protect men from the spectacle of feminine sport. A steel curtain, so that you couldn't even see the outline of waist or ankle.

"You want women in here, you'll need a curtain," he said.

"Well," said Bertha, "I invented the game, so I suppose I make the rules."

"How's that?" he said.

"I invented this strain of bowling."

She was older than he was, and would pay his salary, and for a moment he thought about agreeing, then found he was already saying, "Looks like ordinary candlepin to me."

"It is not."

"In Worcester—"

Truitt barked. With laughter? Not quite. With anger? No, she barked, a noise that meant who's there and I'm here and nothing at all.

"I have never been to Worcester," she said.

"Anyhow," said Joe Wear. He could feel the long muscles of his arms spasming, and he crossed them. Not everyone would give him a job, never mind one of authority. He should be grateful and agreeable. But hadn't he saved her from foolishness once? Hadn't he been hired for his knowledge? "You'll need a curtain," he said again.

Bertha Truitt knew it was wrong to protect somebody else's modesty. Your modesty was your own. "No curtain, Joe."

"You'll get gawkers."

"Let 'em gawk."

That was that.

Gawkers, gapers, gogglers, oglers! She couldn't see them, she was ogle-blind. She rode a bicycle around the city in her split skirt and never wobbled even when the sidewalk boys hooted at her. She still found her way into people's dreams, still dissolved in daylight. Perhaps she was a succubus or a vampire, the way she snuck into dreams and returned to Salford in daylight, reading the funny papers on the sidewalk, laughing so loud the pigeons scattered. She even appeared in the Salford Bugle itself, beneath the headline NEW BOWLING ESTABLISHMENT INVITES ALL WOMEN. In the photograph accompanying the article, Truitt seems to be in mourning, as all women of a certain bustline do: her very bosom grieves, and is brave, and soldiers on. Upon this bosom a bowling alley was founded.

She must have had ancestors. Everyone does. She seemed to have arrived in Salford sui generis, of her own kind, though of course genealogists don't believe such a thing exists. No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.

"I have been parented by pamphlets," Bertha Truitt liked to say, not thinking that a bad thing. The pamphlets were outdated, quaint, quite often hateful. She was the oddest combination of the future and the past anyone had ever met.

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.