The Hanged Man

Against the surreal landscape of the deep south, three Lebanese-American sisters encounter their missing mother six years after she vanished from their lives. Georgia, now a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter, spots her mother's face in the crowd of tour-goes. Virginia, a receptionist at a mental health facility in Mississippi, is sure her mother walks in one day and asks to be committed. Louise, a relay operator in Birmingham, hears her mother's voice late one night on the line. Each of these encounters is fleeting, almost ghostly, ambiguous. Is it really her, their mother, the woman who packed their grandmother's trousseau and walked out of their lives without a word all those years ago? Or is she a vision, a ghost, no more than a memory?

Steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition, in the vein of Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Jesmyn Ward, this atmospheric collection of linked stories explores our complex relationship with loss and our desperate search for meaning.