In the Dust Bowl of 1930s Oklahoma, a family comes apart, as sisters Mackie and Etta Spoon keep secrets from their father, and from each other.

Etta, the dangerously impulsive favorite of her father, longs for adventure someplace far away from the bleak and near-barren plains, and she doesn't care how she gets there; watchful Mackie keeps house and obeys the letter of her father's law, while harboring her own dreams. After the massive 1935 Black Sunday dust storm brings ruin to the family, the sisters' conflict threatens further damage. Seeking escape, and wagering their futures on an Indian boarding school runaway named Audie Kipp, the two leave home to forge their own separate paths, each setting off in search of a new life, each finding a fate different than she expected.

Through shifting perspectives, voices, and characters, What the Thunder Said tracks their wayward progress, following the sisters, their children, and those whose stories intersect with theirs as they range across the high plains of the West in the decades after the Great Depression. Etta's hitchhiking encounter with a bookish couple in the Garden of the Gods; a prairie jackrabbit drive, during which Mackie's son, Jesse, discovers the cloth he's cut from; an old man's failing memory as he tells of spying on an Indian loner on the outskirts of a Kansas town; a middle-aged doctor's chance meeting with a mysterious wayfarer while on a quest to New Mexico in search of his lost youth; and Mackie's late reconciliation with her aged father, whose habit of silence has bred her own---all are rendered in vivid prose that captures theplains and the people who endured devastation and lived to look back on it.

Slow-gathering, powerful, with passages of haunting beauty, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed storytellers.

From National Book Award finalist, Janet Peery, comes this "powerful, haunting, and beautifully written" (Tucson Citizen) collection of linked stories set against the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Etta and Mackie Spoon are sisters growing up on an Oklahoma farm. Etta is rebellious and mercurial, Mackie, shy and overshadowed by her sister, but both carry the weight of dark family secrets. When tragedy strikes, they set out on their own, in search of something greater, something beyond the pallid and brutal landscape they know.

Vivid and, at times, devastating, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed novelists and storytellers.

JANET PEERY, the author of The River Beyond the World and Alligator Dance, has received an NEA Fellowship and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.