Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford

A haunted, surreal debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal - one that upends our understanding of power, predation, and agency.

Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or "Cures"—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson. When they strike up an affair, to the displeasure of her father and Samson's widowed, pregnant sister, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover—and eventually comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.

Follow Me to Ground is fascinating and frightening, urgent and propulsive. In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. Slim but authoritative, Follow Me to Ground lingers long after its final page, pulling the reader into a dream between fairy tale and nightmare, desire and delusion, folktale and warning.

199 pages (January 2020)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Sue Rainsford on A Little Life, The Second Sex, and Edgar Allan Poe: 17 rapid-fire book recs from the author of Follow Me to Ground

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Title Read-alikes: The House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward; The Bone Fire by Gyorgy Dragoman; What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine; Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield; The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman; The Dark Dark: stories by Samantha Hunt; We Can Only Save Ourselves by Alison Wisdom; Sisters by Daisy Johnson; Northwood by Maryse Meijer; The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave; Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas; Night Theater by Vikram Paralkar; and The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams.

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian

In a dusty corner of a basement in a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has long been sealed shut with 39 six-inch-long carriage bolts.

The home's new owners are Chip and Emily Linton and their twin ten-year-old daughters. Together they hope to rebuild their lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his 70-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain after double engine failure. Unlike the Miracle on the Hudson, however, most of the passengers aboard Flight 1611 die on impact or drown. The body count? Thirty-nine—a coincidence not lost on Chip when he discovers the number of bolts in that basement door. Meanwhile, Emily finds herself wondering about the women in this sparsely populated White Mountain village—self-proclaimed herbalists—and their interest in her fifth-grade daughters. Are the women mad? Or is it her husband, in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become desperately tenuous?

 

The result is a poignant and powerful ghost story with all the hallmarks readers have come to expect from bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian: a palpable sense of place, an unerring sense of the demons that drive us, and characters we care about deeply.

 

The difference this time? Some of those characters are dead.

 

375 pages (October 2011)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Chris Bohjalian talks about The Night Strangers inspiration with Penguin Random House Audio:

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Other Child by Joanne Fluke; The Grip of It by Jac Jemc; House of Echoes by Brendan Duffy; The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon; The Chill by Scott Carson; The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin; Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman; The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher; The Shape of Night by Tess Gerritsen;  Stay Awake by Dan Chaon; Nightwoods by Charles Frazier; The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown; and I'd Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman.