‘Outstanding. Orringer writes about the things that everyone writes about – youth, friendship, death, grief – but her narrative settings are fresh and wonderfully knotty’ 
Nick Hornby

‘An amazing debut. Conjures the same exhilaration I felt on reading Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help and Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing’ 
Daily Telegraph

‘Exquisite . . . clear-eyed, compassionate and deeply moving’ 
Emily Perkins, Guardian

‘Strikingly accomplished: there are pages here that had me dry-mouthed, toes curling with anxiety. You can’t read her uninvolved; she engages the heart’ 
Daily Mail

‘Haunting and mysterious, flawless and brilliant’ 
Observer

‘Among the best writing I have encountered in the past few years’ 
The Times

It was Thanksgiving Day and hot, because this was New Orleans; they were driving uptown to have dinner with strangers. Ella pushed at her loose tooth with the tip of her tongue and fanned her legs with the hem of her velvet dress. On the seat beside her, Benjamin fidgeted with his shirt buttons. He had worn his Pilgrim costume, brown shorts and a white shirt and yellow paper buckles taped to his shoes. In the front seat their father drove without a word, while their mother dozed against the window glass. She wore a blue dress and a strand of jade beads and a knit cotton hat beneath which she was bald.

Three months earlier, Ella's father had explained what chemotherapy was and how it would make her mother better. He had even taken Ella to the hospital once when her mother had a treatment. She remembered it like a filmstrip from school, a series of connected images she wished she didn't have to watch: her mother with an IV needle in her arm, the steady drip from the bag of orange liquid, her father speaking softly to himself as he paced the room, her mother shaking so hard she had to be tied down.

At night Ella and her brother tapped a secret code against the wall that separated their rooms: one knock, I'm afraid; two knocks, Don't worry; three knocks. Are you still awake? four, Come quick. And then there was the Emergency Signal, a stream of knocks that kept on coming, which meant her brother could hear their mother and father crying in their bedroom. If it went on for more than a minute, Ella would give four knocks and her brother would run to her room and crawl under the covers.

There were changes in the house, healing rituals that required Ella's mother to go outside and embrace trees or lie face-down on the grass. Sometimes she did a kind of Asian dance that looked like karate. She ate bean paste and Japanese vegetables, or sticky brown rice wrapped in seaweed. And now they were going to have dinner with people they had never met, people who ate seaweed and brown rice every day of their lives.

They drove through the Garden District, where Spanish moss hung like beards from the trees. Once during Mardi Gras, Ella had ridden a trolley here with her brother and grandmother, down to the French Quarter, where they'd eaten beignets at Café du Monde. She wished she were sitting in one of those wrought-iron chairs and shaking powdered sugar onto a beignet. How much better than to be surrounded by strangers, eating food that tasted like the bottom of the sea.

They turned onto a side street, and her father studied the directions. ‘It should be at the end of this block,’ he said.

Ella's mother shifted in her seat. ‘Where are we?’ she asked, her voice dreamy with painkillers.

‘Almost there,’ said Ella's father.

They pulled to the curb in front of a white house with sagging porches and a trampled lawn. Vines covered the walls and moss grew thick and green between the roof slates. Under the porte-cochere stood a beat-up Honda and a Volkswagen with mismatched side panels. A faded bigwheel lay on its side on the walk.

‘Come on,’ their father said, and gave them a tired smile. ‘Time for fun.’ He got out of the car and opened the doors for Ella and Ben and their mother, sweeping his arm chauffeur-like as they climbed out.

Beside the front door was a tarnished doorbell in the shape of a lion's head. ‘Push it,’ her father said. Ella pushed. A sound like church bells echoed inside the house.

Then the door swung open and there was Mister Kaplan, a tall man with wiry orange hair and big dry-looking teeth. He shook hands with Ella's parents, so long and vigorously it seemed to Ella he might as well say Congratulations.

‘And you must be Ben and Ella,’ he said, bending down.

Ella gave a mute nod. Her brother kicked at the doorjamb.

‘Well, come on in,’ he said. ‘I have a tree castle out back.’

Benjamin's face came up, twisted with skepticism. ‘A what?’

‘The kids are back there. They'll show you.’

‘What an interesting foyer,’ their mother said. She bent down to look at the brass animals on the floor, a turtle and a jackal and a llama. Next to the animals stood a blue vase full of rusty metal flowers. A crystal chandelier dangled from the ceiling, its arms hung with dozens of God's-eyes and tiny plastic babies from Mardi Gras king cakes. On a low wooden shelf against the wall, pair after pair of canvas sandals and sneakers and Birkenstocks were piled in a heap. A crayoned sign above it said SHOES OFF NOW!

Ella looked down at her feet. She was wearing her new patent-leather Mary Janes.

‘Your socks are nice too,’ her father said, and touched her shoulder. He stepped out of his own brown loafers and set them on top of the pile. Then he knelt before Ella's mother and removed her pumps. ‘Shoes off,’ he said to Ella and Ben.

‘Even me?’ Ben said. He looked down at his paper buckles.

Their father took off Ben's shoes and removed the paper buckles, tape intact. Then he pressed one buckle onto each of Ben's socks. ‘There,’ he said.

Ben looked as if he might cry.

‘Everyone's in the kitchen,’ Mister Kaplan said. ‘We're all cooking.’

‘Marvelous,’ said Ella's mother. ‘We love to cook.’