On this week’s episode, Rita Zoey Chin joins us to discuss The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern (Melville House, Oct. 4), in which a young woman in the process of ending her life is spurred to adventure by an inheritance from a barely known neighbor. It’s the new book from the author of Let the Tornado Come (2014).

Growing up in the Blazing Calyx Carnival, natural empath Leah Fern idealized her glamorous mother, Jeannie Starr. She soon became a performer herself: billed as the “Youngest and Very Best Fortune Teller in the World,” she specialized in intuiting what her adult clients wanted—and needed—to hear. One day Jeannie delivers Leah to a friend’s house and drives off without explanation, never to return, setting the known world asunder.

Kirkus: “Fifteen years later, on her 21st birthday, Leah feels ‘penned in by the impenetrable wires of solitude, weighted by the kind of shapeless helplessness only the abandoned know,’ and has decided to end her life. A knock interrupts her plans, however, and she receives news that her neighbor Essie East has died and left her an inheritance. After some initial reluctance due to not knowing the woman well, Leah is given a box containing a letter, a check, and an obelisk-shaped urn inlaid with gemstones containing Essie’s ashes. The letter explains that Essie knew Leah’s mother and that if Leah follows her instructions to scatter her ashes, more information about her mother will be revealed.”

Chin—who goes by “Zoey”—and host Megan Labrise discuss the opening chapter, set in small-town South Carolina in 1999, and at the Blazing Calyx Carnival in Alabama, 1984; the character Essie East, who gifts Leah her strange inheritance; Leah’s motivation for undertaking Essie’s prescribed path through the U.S. and Canada; empaths in fiction; the commonalities between writing fiction and memoir; and much more.

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