Amity & Sorrow: A Novel

Amity & Sorrow: A Novel

Peggy Riley

Language: English

Pages: 336

ISBN: 0316220876

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A page-turning literary debut about a mother and her two teenage daughters escaping a cult and starting over.
Two sisters sit in the backseat of a car, bound at the wrists by a strip of white cloth. Their mother, Amaranth, drives for days without pause, desperate to get away from the husband she fears will follow them to the earth's end. Her daughters, Amity and Sorrow, cannot comprehend why they're fleeing or fathom what exists outside their father's polygamous compound. When an exhausted Amaranth crashes their car in rural Oklahoma, rescue arrives in the form of Bradley, a farmer not unfamiliar with loss and uncertain futures. At first mistrustful of the strange, prayerful trio, Bradley allows his abiding tolerance to get the best of him, and the four become a new kind of family.

Full of achingly beautiful prose, AMITY & SORROW is a mesmerizing debut about belief, redemption, and the dark heart of extreme faith.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

short of letting the goats into the temple. Amaranth could only beam at him. Easter was the best of times, with the baby Jesus returned to them, reinstated on His cross, and her husband still at home. It was spring at last, after a hard, long winter, and he had healed from the sicknesses that had plagued him and their community. The whole community had healed. They had lost some children, born too early, and they had lost a wife to icy cold, but now all of them were together and celebrating

is full of them. On each one you could read her husband’s name and their address. You could see the sketch of a small, plain, barn-shaped temple, as it was before the fire. Her throat tightens. Had her daughters found them? Had her daughters thrown them? Did tithing envelopes litter roadsides everywhere they’d been for the last four days and nights? Had they been tossed at borders and crossroads like crumbs for birds, for fathers, to follow? Amaranth builds a fire beside the car from plaits of

Sorrow, not even Dust. When Sorrow opens it to him, he reaches for her, puts his hands right on her and shakes her, and Sorrow doesn’t yell. She doesn’t pull away or shove him back, as she should. She lets Dust touch her and she lets him speak. She listens to him—she actually listens—and when she sees that Amity is watching, she pulls him into the bathroom, into her secret place with her secret altar, where she takes no one but Amity. Amity wonders what he’ll find in there, what he’ll make of the

television boomed preachers all day, robed men in glass churches, hellfire preachers on polyester settees, all hand claps and hallelujahs, while her children stared in silence. Sorrow is changing; she can change. The kitchen garden is a lush green from watering, a ragtag oasis of leaves and stems and fisted buds in every color: orange, fuchsia, violet. The storm moved the seeds from their ordered rows and floated them into untidy masses and clumps. Still, it will be a sight when the plants

over the blankets and the sheet, where arms reach down from the light for her. Two sets of arms. She reaches up to let hands grip her forearms and elbows hook her to lift her, even as he comes for her. She feels her two daughters draw her up, save her, pull her from the room below, even as his hands are in her skirt, around her ankles. She gives one good kick with her wooden sole and feels it connect with bone with a crunch. And then she is in the light of the temple and her two girls are there

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