'An extraordinary, hallucinatory accomplishment' KAREN JOY FOWLER'[A] reminder about what it means to be alive . . .with razor-sharp prose and diction so precise' MORGAN TALTY'Read it and be changed' B. PLADEKSomething terrible has happened. In a mysterious apartment filled with ghosts, our unnamed narrator attempts to explain this to her child - how do I talk about this? she wonders.The truth must become something beautiful. We must begin with a fairy tale. And so she begins to construct a beautiful fairy tale for her child - one that begins with a strange baby boy whose nails grow too fast and whose skin smells of soil.As he grows from a boy into a man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Tragedy strikes in cycles - and wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. These ghosts call out desperately to our narrator as she tries to explain, in the very real world, exactly what has happened to her.And they all agree on one thing, a