Discovering a dead body at a lake near the Canadian border, twelve-year-old Mees Kipp inexplicably brings the man back to life and realizes that she possesses an extraordinary gift that irrevocably shapes the lives of Mees, her two friends, and their community. By the author of Versailles.

The thin place is a place where the line between this world and another one is very thin; where the living and the dead can reconnect. Ever since she was a little girl, Hilda tried to make contact with that "other place" by listening very carefully, not with her ears but with the space just behind and a little above her eyes. She was never all that sure that the things she could hear were real, until she met Linda, a professional psychic, who can talk to the dead. That's what Hilda wants to do, and so she befriends Linda. But as their friendship deepens, Linda unveils some uncomfortable truths. The Thin Place is a horror story about what's really going on in the space just behind and a little above your eyes.

An Indie Next Selection for April 2022 An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022 A Junior Library Guild Selection Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family’s experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of “two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose” (The Guardian). Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape. In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.

This guide for modern-day spiritual seekers draws wisdom from Celtic spiritual practices and leads readers through a pilgrimage of the soul to create space for grace.

"Grim but effervescent." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLYKay Chronister's remarkable debut collection of modern horror tales, Thin Places, echoes with the ghosts of Shirley Jackson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, while forging its own unique gothic sensibility. Here there be monsters! And witches! These are tales of monstrous mothers and dark desires. Love, grief, death; and the exquisite pain and joy of life. With transcendent prose, Chronister chronicles the lives of powerful women and children; wicked witches and demons. These are the traumatic ghosts we all carry, and Chronister knows what it means to be human and humane. Powerful and hypnotic, these are tales you won't forget, from a vibrant new voice.Chronister's eerie debut collection toggles between reality and mythical, chilling otherworlds. Multifaceted female characters, from the nefarious to the desperate, make up the dark subjects of these horror stories. Themes of infertility, grief, and motherhood pervade "The Fifth Gable," in which a household of witches craft babies out of inhuman materials only for the children to die at birth. "White Throat Holler" features a precocious and fearless preacher's daughter who hunts demons to stop them from claiming her town's mothers and children. In "Russula's Wake" (not for those who are disturbed by the suggestion of animal cruelty), a young widow tries to save her youngest daughter from sharing the curse of her older children, who must feast on animal flesh in order to continue appearing as normal children. Grim but effervescent, Chronister's economical prose packs a powerful punch ("'Are you dead?' Martha laughed, spat out of a bloodied mouth: 'I wish. I wish I was.'"). These modern gothics are as enticing as they are frightening.Kay Chronister is a writer living in Tucson, Arizona. She was the winner of the 2015 Dell Magazine Award, and her fiction has since appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Black Static, The Dark and elsewhere. Her first collection of short stories, Thin Places, is out now from Undertow Publications.In her non-spare time, Kay is currently a PhD candidate in Literature at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on romance, the Gothic, folklore, and women's writing.

In her moving spiritual memoir, Mary DeMuth traces the winding path of “thin places” in her life—places where she experienced longing and healing more intensely than before. As DeMuth writes, “Thin places are snatches of holy ground, tucked into the corners of our world, where we might just catch a glimpse of eternity. They are aha moments, beautiful realizations, when the Son of God bursts through the hazy fog of our monotony and shines on us afresh.”From losing her earthly father to discovering a heavenly Father who never leaves, from singing Olivia Newton-John songs to the sky to worshiping God under a French sun, from surviving abuse as a latchkey kid to experiencing the joy of mothering three children, DeMuth’s story calls readers to a deeper understanding of their own story. With unusual spiritual wisdom, she looks for God in the past so that she might experience him more profoundly in the present. Her powerful words invite readers to know God in a new way—a God ready to break through any ordinary day or extraordinary pain and offer a glimpse of eternity.

Bill and Terry Treacy died three months apart, after fifty years of marriage and a lifetime of faith. Devastated by this loss, their ten children found comfort in inexplicable signs assuring them that their parents were at peace, reunited in heaven, and yet still present in the lives of those who grieved for them. In Thin Places: Where Faith Is Affirmed and Hope Dwells, Mary Treacy O?Keefe describes such signs as thin places'sudden realizations of that ethereal veil between what we know of earth and what we believe of heaven. In sharing her family's story (and those of many others), she shows how thin places are present in ordinary places at ordinary times'and how such moments of grace reveal Divine loving messages of faith and hope in our daily lives.