On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight-year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents --- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality.

This latest volume of tales by the bestselling author of THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE features characters who pursue connections through love, sex and family, including a golden-haired girl who appears in an orchard to apple-eating attendants, a woman who cannot resume normal life after sharing a fantasy with her husband, and an unattractive woman who stays with her ogre husband after he accidentally eats their children.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice.