TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT
THE PHANTOM LIMBS OF THE ROLLOW SISTERS
Renowned author Timothy Schaffert’s celebrated debut novel, reissued here in an entirely new paperback edition, chronicles two sisters on the cusp of womanhood as they struggle to understand their father’s suicide as well their mother’s abandonment of them many years earlier. On graduating from high school, the sisters are once again set adrift, this time by their grandmother who leaves them for Florida. In order to survive, and perhaps even thrive, on their path to adulthood, they must learn to reconcile their pasts and discover how to depend upon themselves as well as on each other.
In a story that rises out of the spare Nebraska landscape, Schaffert delivers a redemptive tale about two young women searching for wholeness and love.
$14.95 | Fiction Paperback | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | 240 pages
October 2007
ISBN: 978-1-932961-42-3
EISBN: 978-1-93607-128-9
In her secondhand shop, Mabel stretched out on the fainting sofa, feeling tipsy from the summer’s heat, not knowing, for a moment, if it was June, July, or August. She shook up a leaking snow globe, the white flakes settling in the laps of lovers on a gondola. Mabel had read in a book of antiques that the snow in snow globes was once made of sawed-up bone. Though Mabel was very young, she often pictured her demise, often hovered above her own Valentino-like funeral with women collapsing and broad-chested men singing impromptu bass tremolo. She’d like to donate her skeleton to a snow globe maker, liked thinking of her remains forever drifting among the plastic landscapes of a souvenir.
Mabel watched her sister Lily put on lipstick in front of the mirror of the decades-old nickel bubblegum machine. Sometimes Mabel wondered if she’d been separated at birth from her real sister, for Lily and Mabel shared no resemblance. In a fairy tale, Lily would have been the fair sister of goodness, goldilocked and rosy-faced, and Mabel the nasty one, made up of pointy bones and think skin and a hank of black hair.
Timothy Schaffert grew up on a farm in Nebraska and currently lives in Omaha. He’s the author of three previous critically acclaimed novels including The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters and The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God. His novels have been a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His writing has won numerous other awards and honors awards, including the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award and the Nebraska Book Award. He currently teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Author photo by Rodney Rahl
