This Earth You'll Come Back To

Winner: 2017 Independent Press Award for Women's Fiction

"Original, exceptional, impressive, and an absorbing read from beginning to end" —Midwest Book Review

"From her afterlife a newly dead mother watches her restless wandering daughter arriving, late as usual, at the cemetery. Skeptic, forgiving, loving, the mother tells us the girl's story, about her wanderings and the whole family from which she wandered. This is an astonishing narrative feat—a self-portrait through the eyes of the Other, the Mother. Through her unforgettable debut novel, Roether sustains a luminous and compassionate embrace of how we fail, and fail each other, and life still goes richly on." — Robert Kelly

Rose Healy of Blanchardville, Ohio, child bootlegger, WWII veteran, devoted reader of Tolstoy, and heroic mother of ten, had the nerve to die before her youngest daughter could get home. Which, as Rose would say, was her own damn fault. Yet, when...