The Odd Shelf
A Novel
Lois is an outgoing librarian in a small southern town who hates to travel and has worked hard to have a spectacularly normal life. But the arctic dreams she’s pushed herself to ignore are starting to push back. Jack has long left normal behind, along with his sensible job researching memory in mice. He’s in a professional free fall, following the images in his head to the Arctic ... and, ultimately, to Lois.
As Lois and Jack’s stories spiral into each other, Alex and Lena MacDonald's parallel tale is told in haunting flashback as an epistolary romance. The strength of their connection is dragging their ancestors through snow and ice to uncover the truth: Sometimes who we are is less important than who we were, and who we were stays with us—ghosts in our machine—encoded in our DNA. |