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Originally published in 1986, Rebecca Brown’s brilliant first novel explores the psychic repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic family, and the ways in which one woman’s past continues to inform and inhabit her life. Robin Daley’s childhood is dominated by a sense of impermanence: her father, a flamboyant, hard-drinking military pilot whom Robin both idolizes and resents, disappears as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrives; her family is forever packing and unpacking their possessions as they move from one place to the next. Her adulthood offers an escape, a chance to find what it is she longs for--security, love, a place to call home. But strange things happen when the dark corners and locked rooms of family life are revealed, and Robin finds that her world is still haunted by her past in ways that are wildly fantastic and terribly real.

“A doom-filled heart-aching first novel, flooded with meditative fantasy.” -- Kirkus Review

“Thank goodness for once one can say here is a real new voice—ripe and imaginative, often funny, and sliding craftily between fact and wishful fantasy.” – The Sunday Times (London)

“Exceptionally well written . . . Rebecca Brown takes her readers from the ordinary realities of army-base living and often gone, drinking/drunken pilot father into the unrealities of living with adults in denial, where the thin lines between daily life and reality shrink and disappear.” -- Carol Seajay, Feminist Bookstore News

Rebecca Brown is the author of Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You , The End of Youth , and The Terrible Girls . She lives in Seattle.