Excerpt from Outlawed by Anna North, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She had a way of talking to me like we were girls the same age gossiping after school, but this wasn't gossip and we weren't friends. I kept my voice light and happy.

"Mama says that doesn't matter so much," I said. "She says the most important thing is the time of month. That's why I always mark my calendar."

"Your mama's a very smart woman," she said. She had never liked my mama. "But sometimes every little bit helps."

She took the tea cups from my hands.

"I'll finish this," she said. "You get ready for your work."

I didn't take my mother-in-law's advice — I'd never liked lazing around in bed. But I started taking my temperature every day so I'd know exactly when my fertile time was coming. Still I didn't worry — Mama had said it took her eight months to get pregnant with me, and my daddy almost left her, but after that Janie and Jessamine and Bee were easy. My husband made fun of his mother when we were alone — he said she meddled so much in his older brother's marriage that his sister-in-law banned her from their house. Six more months we were happy and then it was a year.

"There's only one thing to do now," my mama said. "You'll have to sleep with someone else."

Half the time, she explained, the man was the one who was barren.

This shocked me. Mrs. Spencer had taught us that the most common reason for failing to conceive a child was not lying with one's husband often enough, and the second was forgetting one's prayers. If a woman did her duty by her husband and baby Jesus and still did not become pregnant, then most likely she had been cursed by a witch — usually a woman who, barren herself, wanted to infect others with her malady.

I knew from Mama that there was no such thing as curses and that sometimes the body simply went wrong all on its own, but I had never heard of a man being barren before. When Maisie Carter and her husband couldn't have a baby, it was Maisie who got kicked out of the house and had to live down by the river with the tinkers and the drunks. When Lucy McGarry didn't get pregnant her family took her back in, but when two of her neighbors miscarried the same summer, everyone looked to Lucy for the cause. I was eleven when she was hanged for a witch. I had not yet started going on rounds with Mama; I had never seen a person die. It terrified me, not the violence of it but the swiftness, how one moment Lucy was standing on the platform and the next she was dangling limp below it. I tried to imagine it myself: what it would be to see and think and feel and then suddenly plunge into blackness — more than blackness, into nothingness. It kept me awake that night and for many nights after, the dread of it. But at the gallows I cheered with everyone else; only Mama did not cheer.

"I don't want to sleep with someone else," I said. "Can't we just try a little longer?"

Mama shook her head.

"People are already starting to gossip," she said. "My patients are asking me if you're pregnant yet."

She would find someone for me, she said. There were men who did this for money, men whose virility was proven and who knew how to keep a secret. When it was the right time of month, I'd meet with one of them during the day for a few days running.

Excerpted from Outlawed by Anna North. Excerpted with the permission of Bloomsbury Publishing.