At 17, orphans Ruth and Nat are on the brink of aging out of the religious cult they live in. Nat, who claims to talk with the dead, shares his visions with the other children, while Ruth helps him set the stage. When con man Mr. Bell comes to the home, he discovers in them a perfect scam, and he recruits them to join him in his travels. Years later, Ruth arrives at her sister's home and entices her niece Cora to join her on a walking journey. Cora, practical, hardworking, pregnant by a married man, is unconnected to her own life and willingly goes with Ruth. The walking is hard, but Cora is fascinated by her silent aunt and is certain that Ruth is taking her somewhere important. In alternating chapters, readers follow teenage Ruth and Nat as they travel, while Cora and Ruth's present-day walking journey bridges the past into a ghostly present that provides a way for Cora to connect not only with Nat but with the baby who is inching its way into her life. It is perplexing why Cora follows the silent Ruth, but Ruth's story demands to be told, and Hunt delivers it in a prose style that dwells within another realm, allowing disbelief to be easily suspended. Much like Cora, who blindly follows Ruth into the wilds beyond her home, readers will wonder where they are going and by joining the protagonists' journey will discover that what they imagine they know about someone is often quite different from the reality. VERDICT Hunt's lyrical writing and compelling tale are perfect for well-read teens.-Connie Williams, Petaluma High School, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

THE ABUNDANCE: Narrative Essays Old and New, by Annie Dillard. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Dillard selects 22 of her best pieces from the past four decades, including dispatches from coastal Maine and a New Age Catholic church. Across these essays, "her preferred method is to transform, through the alchemy of metaphor, natural phenomena into spiritual ones," Donovan Hohn said here. EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. (Broadway, $17.) In this wrenching account, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, chronicles eight impoverished families around Milwaukee for whom eviction is a near-constant fear. While these tenants live in squalor, their landlords and others profit from their misfortune; the book casts light on how the poor are regularly exploited. NOT IN GOD'S NAME: Confronting Religious Violence, by Jonathan Sacks. (Schocken, $16.95.) Sacks, a rabbi, argues that religion must be part of the solution to combating what he sees as politicized religious extremism. Drawing on Genesis for guidance, he outlines an argument that justice and decency should prevail over loyalty toward one's own group. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS, by Edna O'Brien. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) A mysterious outsider arrives in a small Irish town, leaving residents at turns curious and skeptical. There's reason for concern: He's a Balkan War criminal, but succeeds in transfixing the locals, who view him as a healer or holy man, until his secret comes out. His relationship with a young woman, her naïveté dispelled, threatens to upend her life, but she gains strength and confidence from the ordeal. O'Brien's "unsettling fabulist vision" recalls "Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode," our reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, wrote here. MR. SPLITFOOT, by Samantha Hunt. (Mariner, $14.95.) Ruth and Nat, two orphans in a foster home headed by a religious fanatic, discover an ability to speak to the dead; when a con man learns of their talent, he's eager to profit from it. In alternating chapters, the story jumps to the present day, when Ruth - who has become eerily mute - lures her pregnant niece on a journey by foot across New York State. SUDDEN DEATH, byÁIvaro Enrigue. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Riverhead, $16.) In a novel bursting with historical figures - Galileo, Anne Boleyn, Caravaggio - 16th-century monks imbue tennis matches with spiritual import; a French executioner is himself executed; and Spanish conquistadors carry out their bloody siege of Mexico, a merger of civilizations with "planetary aftershocks."D

Foster children, abandoned houses, and craters left by meteorites weave together a strange and frightening ghost story. In Hunt's surreal third novel (The Invention of Everything Else, 2008, etc.), 17-year-olds Nat and Ruth cleave to each other at The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission in upstate New York. Nat's "ability" to talk to the dead catches the attention of Mr. Bell, a con man, who convinces them to take their show on the road. A strange man offers to buy Ruth from her fanatical foster father, but Ruth gets Mr. Bell to marry her instead, creating a series of fraught and unsettling triangular relationships. Fourteen years later, Cora, Ruth's heavily pregnant niece, stumbles through woods and along highways, following her now mute and enigmatic aunt without understanding why. Wry, absurd, and occasionally silly humor punctures the weighty themes of motherhood, aging, and loss. "We're the Society for Confusing Literature and the Real Lies," a woman explains to Cora at an event on the Erie Canal in which Captain Ahab and Huck Finn compete with Lord Nelson and a German U-boat. Apparent non sequiturs pepper the dialogue throughout, and while at first they give the story a stilted quality, the seemingly random details soon stitch together into a larger meaning. Cora's pregnancy is a natural metaphor for bridging the tiny with the universal, and the novel is rife with chewy metaphors and similes that require careful parsing. At times, the novel's murky obscurity may be vexinga passage featuring a tight-lipped runaway nun is particularly gnomicbut the drip of information and layers of potent imagery keep the pages turning. A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* As with her last novel, The Invention of Everything Else (2007), Hunt shows her skill in transforming the trappings of a factual story into a fantastical one more compelling and richer than the original. Mr. Splitfoot, loosely based on the Fox sisters, mediums from New York, revolves around Nat and Ruth, inseparable charges at the Love of Christ foster home. Revolting against the draconian and darkly whimsical Father Arthur, Nat and Ruth stage séances for the other orphans. When a traveling salesman, Mr. Bell, overhears them at one of the séances and offers to act as their agent, Nat and Ruth leave the orphanage, though they find new perils on the outside in particular, a zealot who becomes infatuated with Ruth. Hunt moves between Nat and Ruth's story and events set 20 years later, when Cora, Ruth's niece, discovers she's pregnant, and Ruth, now mysteriously mute, silently leads Cora away from her home without saying where or why they are going. The narratives collide in a haunting finish. Nat and Ruth's seeming helplessness imbues the story with an eerie sense of danger, though Hunt expertly juxtaposes this against moments of tenderness and love. Motherhood, religious zeal, poverty, predation, and the frailty yet relentlessness of life are among the rich themes that Hunt explores here. Liberally deconstructed sentences, which to some readers may prove taxing, will for others be just the thing to activate the book's fantastical qualities.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist

Hunt's ethereal third novel (after Orange Prize-finalist The Invention of Everything Else) is a nod to the mid-19th-century legend of the Fox sisters, mediums who conjured up a devilish spirit they called Mr. Splitfoot in order to separate the gullible from their money. The book deftly straddles the slippery line between fantasy and reality in a story that's both gripping and wonderfully mystifying. Hailing from the Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission-a halfway house filled with damaged souls and run by a conniving religious kook-Ruth and Nat occupy their turbulent adolescent years pretending they can talk to dead people. When they reach 18, the two latch on to a mysterious benefactor who convinces them to use their skill for cash. Decades later, a newly pregnant Cora-Ruth's niece-awakens to find the long-absent Ruth standing by her bedside and is whisked off on a wild goose chase across New York. Where they're going and why, the mute Ruth won't say. Hunt's use of a split narrative to measuredly disclose snippets of Ruth's past and Cora's present in alternating, interconnected chapters builds suspense while keeping readers guessing about what crazy turn might happen next. Hints of what's in store for readers include a cult of Etherists, a noseless man, a pile of lost money, and a scar-like pattern of meteorite landings. This spellbinder is storytelling at its best. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.