Excerpt from The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"There ain't no haints in Detroit," Francis Turner said. His children jerked at the sound of his voice. That was how he existed in their lives: suddenly there, on his own time, his quiet authority augmenting the air in a room. He stepped over their skinny brown legs and opened the big room's door.

Francis Turner called Cha-Cha into the room.

The window was open, and the beige sheets from Cha-Cha's bed hung over the sill.

"Look under the bed."

Cha-Cha looked.

"Behind the dresser."

Nothing there.

"Put them sheets back where they belong."

Cha-Cha obliged. He felt his father's eyes on him as he worked. When he finished, he sat down on the bed, unprompted, and rubbed his neck. Francis Turner sat next to him.

"Ain't no haints in Detroit, son." He did not look at Cha-Cha.

"It tried to run me outta the room."

"I don't know what all happened, but it wasn't that."

Cha-Cha opened his mouth, then closed it.

"If you ain't grown enough to sleep by yourself, I suggest you move on back across the hall."

Francis Turner stood up to go, faced his son. He reached for Cha-Cha's collar, pulled it open, and put his index finger to the line of irritated skin below the Adam's apple. For a moment Cha-Cha saw the specter of true panic in his father's eyes, then Francis's face settled into an ambivalent frown.

"That'll be gone in a day or two," he said.

In the hallway the other children stood lined up against the wall. Marlene, child number five and a bit sickly, had finally come out of the girls' room.

"Francey and Quincy, clean up Lonnie's mess, and all y'all best go to sleep. I don't wanna hear nobody talkin about they're tired come morning."

Francis Turner closed his bedroom door.

The mess was cleaned up, but no one, not even little Lonnie, slept in the right bed that night. How could they, with the window curtains puffing out and sucking in like gauzy lungs in the breeze? The children crowded into Cha-Cha's room?—?a privileged first visit for most of them.

Excerpted from The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. Copyright © 2015 by Angela Flournoy. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.