Sara Rich

Ligatures Sara Rich

Publisher Marketing: Stanza Thompson knows how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but she can't read the signs of the times. Not, at least, until the witching hour. Stanza is a young American scholar working in Belgium when her husband, Pierre, is killed in a tragic bicycle accident. Devastated by her soul mate's death, she moves back to her family home in rural Kansas. In her five-year absence, Stanza's homeland - and especially her hometown - has become darkly twisted, creating something dangerously inhospitable to outsiders. As rebellious as she is brilliant, Stanza is a stranger in the university where she teaches, even in the town where she was born and raised. With ghosts and feral hounds as companions, she stumbles upon a carving in the woods that harkens back to Ozark magic, promising to single out and kill a witch. This discovery sends Stanza on a tornadic quest into regional folklore, a string of historical murders, and the occult - and ultimately, into the mysteries of her own bloody heritage and fey destiny. Composed of idiosyncratic characters and idiomatic prose, Ligatures combines elements of the weird, Southern Gothic, and magical realism to create a world that is familiar and terrifying at once. Between the suspense and the quality of writing, you won't be able to put down this spellbinding first novel, even long after it's finished. Reviewers have called Ligatures "perceptive" with a "dimensional and complicated" protagonist that "brings to mind the early work of Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood." Contributor Bio:  Rich, Sara Sara Rich (1980-) was born in Norfolk, Virginia and grew up in rural Kansas, where she started writing short stories and poetry at the age of six. Nowadays, she writes weird and allohistorical fiction and has authored childrens' books in English and Dutch, as well as numerous nonfiction works. She received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Kansas (2003), an MA in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2008), and a PhD in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Leuven in Belgium (2013). She is the founding editor of Dragoman Editing & Publishing (2013), which operates out of Leuven, Belgium, where she lives with her husband, Wesley, and their two Alaskan Malamutes.