The Ice Garden

Ten-year-old Claire adores her brand-new baby sister, but her mother doesn't feel the same. Trapped in the suffocating culture of the small-town South in the early 1960s, Claire's mother tries to cope with her own mental illness and all the expectations placed upon a woman of her class. While Claire's father remains too dazzled by his beautiful wife to recognize the impending dangers, Claire is left largely on her own to save herself and her baby sister--with mesmerizing and shocking consequences.

In 2009, Moira Crone was given the Robert Penn Warren Award from the fellowship of Southern Writers for the body of her work. Calling her a "writer's writer," Allan Gurganus wrote the prize citation, saying, "Moira Crone is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart." Her work has been categorized as "Southern gnostic," in recognition of her spiritual, prophetic, and philosophical concerns. She has published three novels and three books of stories. Her shorter pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oxford American, and more than two dozen anthologies. Her first speculative novel, THE NOT YET, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, an international prize for science fiction paper back of the year in 2013. Her current novel THE ICE GARDEN has been called "a heart stopper."