AMITY AND SORROW

Unforgettable story about belief, family, and redemption, and about remembering who you once were in the face of a new world.

A mother, Amaranth, and two daughters, Amity age twelve and Sorrow, fifteen, have been driving for four straight days without pausing for sleep, and crash their car in rural Oklahoma. The girls in the back seat are linked by their bound wrists, one of them has just had a miscarriage.

Amaranth is desperate to get away from a man who she feels to be omnipotent, omniscient, who will follow them wherever they go. They are in flight from a cult, we slowly discover, a group of fifty women, their children and the one man who is husband to them all. They are rescued by a down-on-his-luck farmer and the women begin to make a slow re-entry to the "real" world. Well, entry, actually, for Amity and Sorrow, as life in the "family" is all they have ever know.

The author does an incredible job braiding past and present together and the practices of the cult -gradually revealed, weirdly plausible make you understand how all these women, not to mention all their children, could be dominated by one man who seems to believe his own prophesies. The picture of the cult is fascinating, the characters come alive and the plot will keep you on tenterhooks.

Peggy Riley is a writer and playwright, originally from Los Angeles and now living in Britain on the North Kent coast. She has been a bookseller, festival producer, and writer in residence at a young-offender prison. Amity & Sorrow is her first novel.