As a child growing up by the sea, Martha Mary endured her parents' divorce, survived a tragedy that robbed her and her younger sister of their innocence, and she saw ghosts. Now a young adult, she escapes to a gorgeous inland town to study photography and to distance herself from that painful past and from her secret ability. There she impresses fellow students with her haunting images of abandoned landscapes, falls into a passionate love affair with a manipulative professor, and becomes entangled in the case of a young woman who has disappeared, when one Indian summer afternoon the missing woman appears beneath Martha's apartment window, wearing a down coat, her hair flecked with ice. Will Martha's gifts leave her terrifyingly alone, or will they lead her to a vital human connection? With nods to Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier, Karen Brown's The Clairvoyants spins an eerie tale, one that thrums with the longings of imperfect people, living and dead, who want to be seen and loved.

Author Biography

Karen Brown's Little Sinners and Other Stories was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012; her previous collection, Pins and Needles, received AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and her first novel, The Longings of Wayward Girls, was published in 2013 by Washington Square Press to rave reviews. Her work has been featured in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and The New York Times. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of South Florida.