Sing Them Home

Everyone in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician’s wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope’s three children, the stability of life with their distant, preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother’s spitfire best friend, is no match for their mother’s absence. Once grown up, Larken, the eldest child, an art history professor, seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the only son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and Bonnie, the baby of the family, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs the roadside for clues to her mother’s legacy and permission to move on. When, decades after their mother’s disappearance, the siblings are summoned home after their father’s sudden death, they are forced to revisit the childhood tragedy at the centre of their lives. With breathtaking lyricism, wisdom and humour, Stephanie Kallos explores the consequences of protecting the ones we love and conjures an extraordinary cast of characters teeming with quirks, blind spots and secrets. Sing Them Home is a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by tragedy, lives poised―unbeknownst to the characters themselves―for redemption.