Juliette Rousseau offers up a poignant, sensitive, and luminous literary debut paying tribute to the women in her family.

"We are heiresses to a fierce determination, we descendants of failed abortions, forced pregnancies. This is inextricable from our pain and rage, passed down from one generation to the next like one might wring out a blood-soaked rag in the anonymity of a kitchen by night." From the familial dwelling where she's come home to roose, a woman speaks to her vanished sister, summoning their childhood memories. Burdened by a history of patriarchal violence, she explores possibilities for surviving this legacy in a devastated rural landscape, where the hedges are gone and the woods thinned, surrounded by industrialized cornfields.