Amity & Sorrow
Authors: Peggy Riley
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Literary, #Religious
| Amity Sorrow | |
| Peggy Riley | |
| Headline Book Publishing (2013) | |
| Tags: | Literary, Fiction, Religious, Contemporary Women, General |
A mother and her daughters drive for days without sleep until they crash their car in rural Oklahoma. The mother, Amaranth, is desperate to get away from someone she's convinced will follow them wherever they go--her husband. The girls, Amity and Sorrow, can't imagine what the world holds outside their father's polygamous compound. Rescue comes in the unlikely form of Bradley, a farmer grieving the loss of his wife. At first unwelcoming to these strange, prayerful women, Bradley's abiding tolerance gets the best of him, and they become a new kind of family. An unforgettable story of belief and redemption, AMITY SORROW is about the influence of community and learning to stand on your own.
PEGGY RILEY
Copyright © 2013 Peggy Riley
The right of Peggy Riley to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN 978 0 7553 9439 5
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Table of Contents
Before: The Raising of the Temple
Peggy Riley is a writer and playwright. Her work has been produced, broadcast and published in magazines and anthologies. She has been a bookseller, festival producer and writer-in-residence at a young offender prison. AMITY & SORROW is her first novel.
For more information on Peggy Riley, visit
www.peggyriley.com
or follow her on Twitter:
@Peggy_Riley
‘Amity & Sorrow, grace and hope, honor and innocence, bliss and deliverance – all of this from one beautifully nuanced story about the nature of family and the power of faith. I savored every word’ Lori Lansens, author of
The Girls
‘[I was] hooked from the very start … beautifully crafted, tightly restrained, and yet enormously powerful and dramatic novel’ Essie Fox, author of
The Somnambulist
‘A startlingly original, intelligent and beautiful first novel that I found riveting from page one. I can only wait with great anticipation for what comes next from Peggy Riley’ Michael Connelly
‘A beautiful and terrifying book. Peggy Riley tells a complex and enthralling tale of family love and religious belief with uncommon wisdom, grace, and skill’ Sigrid Nunez, author of
The Last of Her Kind
‘Fierce and disturbing … Riley’s debut novel is a harsh but compassionate look at nature vs. nurture through the lens of a polygamous cult’
Publishers Weekly
(Starred Review)
‘[An] accomplished, harrowing debut … Riley’s descriptive prose is rich in metaphor … [and] the haunting literary drama simmers to a boil as it deftly navigates issues of family, faith, community, and redemption’ Ann Kelley,
Booklist
(Starred Review)
One father; two daughters; fifty wives. They’re waiting for salvation. Pray it never comes.
In the wake of a suspicious fire, Amaranth gathers her barely-teenage daughters, Amity and Sorrow, and flees from the rural fundamentalist cult run by her husband. After four days on the run, Amaranth crashes the car, leaving the family stranded at a gas station, innocent and terrified.
Rescue comes in the unlikely form of a downtrodden farmer, who offers sanctuary. But while Amity blossoms in this new world, free from her father’s faithful tyranny, Sorrow will do anything to get back home. And Amaranth herself needs to know what happened to the other wives, the other children.
AMITY & SORROW is a novel about God, sex, and farming; an unforgettable journey into the horrors a true believer can inflict upon his family. It is the gripping story of these remarkable women, the beauty and suffering of their former lives and their heartbreaking, hopeful, doubtful future. It is the darkest novel about love and the Good Life you will ever read.
For Graham
I would like to thank everyone at Little, Brown: my editor, Judy Clain, whose clarity and concision helped to make
Amity & Sorrow
a leaner, better book; her assistant, Amanda Brower; publisher Michael Pietsch; Liz Garriga; Jayne Yaffe Kemp; and everyone in the art department. Many thanks to Tinder Press in the UK – to editor Charlotte Mendelson for her support and encouragement throughout this twisty process; her assistant, Emily Kitchin; Samantha Eades; Vicky Palmer; Yeti Lambregts; and all the team at Headline.
Grateful thanks to my agent, Joy Harris, for taking a leap of faith with me.
Thank you to New Writing South and director Chris Taylor for their support during the writing of my first draft. Not only did they provide a grant so that I could take up a place at Arvon, they also supplied a free read by the Literary Consultancy. Many thanks to Hilary Johnson for her manuscript assessment and for introducing me to writer and editor Caroline Upcher, who helped me see my book with fresh eyes.
Thank you to Sara Maitland and Susan Elderkin, authors who were particularly generous with their time and their feedback.
Thank you, early readers and dear friends: Tim Macedo-Hatch, Monique L’Heureux, Sue Bickley, and my great friend Katherine May, who twice read drafts in a hurry, when I needed her most. Thank you to the coven and to friends and family, near and far.
Thank you to the writers and readers on Twitter and to the #amwriting online community for their generous support. You provided good company and solace during many a draft.
I would like to acknowledge books that were particularly helpful while putting the world of the book together: Jon Krakauer’s
Under the Banner of Heaven
for its consummate history of Mormon fundamentalism;
The Worst Hard Time
by Timothy Egan, a history of the Dust Bowl and the Oklahomans who stayed; and John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath,
which casts a grand shadow over any book about Oklahoma, farming, drought, or road trips.
Finally, many thanks to my husband, Graham, for building me the Blue House and for making a home for my heart.
Two sisters sit, side by side, in the backseat of an old car. Amity and Sorrow.
Their hands are hot and close together. A strip of white fabric loops between them, tying them together, wrist-to-wrist.
Their mother, Amaranth, drives them. The car pushes forward, endlessly forward, but her eyes are always watching in the rearview mirror, scanning the road behind them for cars.
Amity watches through her window, glass dotted by chin, nose, forehead, and calls out all she can see to Sorrow: brown fields and green fields, gas stations and grain elevators. She calls out the empty cross of the power pole. She is watching for the end of the world. Father told them it would come and, surely, it will. They will see its signs, even far from him. Even here.
Sorrow has her head down and her back curled over so she cannot watch. She cups her belly and groans.
‘Carsick,’ says Mother.
Homesick, thinks Amity.
Their mother is taking them from their home and all they know, and they have no idea how they will ever get her to turn around and take them back.
