Excerpt from Harrow by Joy Williams, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

During my childhood my mother took me to many doctors, all of whom maintained I was perfectly healthy. She was told again and again that she had been mistaken, that if I had stopped breathing for as long as she claimed, any number of neurological issues would have arisen. And they had not. In a crisis of fright, time had played a trick on her, a new and inexperienced mother. Most likely I had never stopped breathing at all.

Yet, my mother was convinced that I had been somewhere, in some frightful chaos of non-being that nevertheless contained an observable yet incomprehensible future to which we would all be subjected.

My father moved out, into a suite of rooms above the boatyard offices. My mother and I continued to live in the seaside house which she neglected. She no longer went to the club or saw her friends, who felt they'd endured quite enough of us and the rumors of that night.

I continued to be subjected to medical examinations and psychological testing. One specialist was interested in me for a time because he believed that only genetic mutations could rewire the brain to cope with the environmental and moral challenges of a ruined, overpopulated world. But he found nothing. He had never found anything. He admitted it was just a sensible, attractive theory.

I remember the results of my last test, the last because my mother no longer had the money to continue. She could not pay—the secular bastards, she called them—and they never contacted us again. She came to believe that our every thought and emotion was being graphed by a newly sinister camarilla. The only way she could save me from this situation was if she severed herself from me. But this belief came later. Until then, I had a ragged succession of tutors and my mother watched me anxiously, fearful that the error of my return would be corrected.

Excerpted from Harrow by Joy Williams. Copyright © 2021 by Joy Williams. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.