The Barter
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A heart-stopping tale as provocative as is suspenseful, about two conflicted women, separated by one hundred years, and bound by an unthinkable sacrifice.
The Barter is a ghost story and a love story, a riveting emotional tale that also explores motherhood and work and feminism. Set in Texas, in present day, and at the turn of the twentieth century, the novel follows two young mothers at the turning point of their lives.
Bridget has given up her career as an attorney to raise her daughter, joining a cadre of stay-at-home mothers seeking fulfillment in a quiet suburb. But for Bridget, some crucial part of the exchange is absent: Something she loves and needs. And now a terrifying presence has entered her home; only nobody but Bridget can feel it.
On a farm in 1902, a young city bride takes a farmer husband. The marriage bed will become both crucible and anvil as Rebecca first allows, then negates, the powerful erotic connection between them. She turns her back on John to give all her love to their child. Much will occur in this cold house, none of it good.
As Siobhan Adcock crosscuts these stories with mounting tension, each woman arrives at a terrible ordeal of her own making, tinged with love and fear and dread. What will they sacrifice to save their families—and themselves? Readers will slow down to enjoy the gorgeous language, then speed up to see what happens next in a plot that thrums with the weight of decision—and its explosive consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Motherhood is the destabilizing bond that nearly undoes two women linked across a century in Adcock's suspenseful debut. Former attorney and new mother Bridget is sitting up with her wailing 10-month-old daughter, Julie, when she first senses a ghost in her Austin, Tex., home. The ghost appears to be the spirit of a dead woman. Or is it? Sometimes the presence looks like nothing more than an enormous white cloud. What's clear is that Bridget is conflicted, whether about leaving her job; relying on her husband, Mark, as he spends more and more time at his tech startup; or indulging her own fears and anxiety when "she should be grateful." As Bridget spins out in the suburbs, the narrative travels back to 1902 to introduce Rebecca Mueller, 20 years old and newly married. Rebecca struggles against her temper, impulsive nature, and "smothering moments of panic" while negotiating the transition from doctor's daughter to farmer's wife in the Texas Hill Country. Adcock builds tension with the ghost's periodic visitations, but the novel's real concern lies in the more mundane but no less weighty issue of how fear and self-doubt can corrode marriages and families.
