These Dreams: A Novel

When a stranger poses this question in a supermarket checkout line, Cricket Thompson is jolted out of her everyday life to face a startling revelation: She has a loving husband and two wonderful teenage daughters and feels profoundly and utterly alone. The tides of change are slowly pulling her toward something new and barely recognizable: another man. But before she can even contemplate this internal shift, an act of deadly violence erupts at the local shopping mall, causing Cricket's whole world to come crashing down. Through the prism of this surreal crisis, Cricket's life is irrevocably altered...and without her knowledge or consent, she is plunged into the kind of cataclysmic event that by its very nature breeds transformation. An exploration of the solace of dreams and the fragility of being wide awake, These Dreams is an astoundingly powerful and heart-wrenching novel that no reader will soon forget.

Look for Barbara Chepaitis's wonderful new novel, Something Unpredictable -- coming soon in hardcover from Atria Books.