An Impossibility of Crows
A Novel
Published on 3. March 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
248 pages
978-1-62534-925-5 (ISBN)
Description
A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longing
In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations-bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.
Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific-and deeply personal-experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential-manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein's monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family's past.
A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.
In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations-bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.
Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific-and deeply personal-experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential-manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein's monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family's past.
A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.
Reviews / Votes
"[A] fiercely unsettling gothic novel that fuses maternal devotion, scientific obsession, and inherited trauma."-Publishers Weekly"This book is literary horror at its grotesque best."-CrimeReads
"[A] darkly glorious novel that rides the horrific undercurrents of a scientist-mother's dual devotion to her child and craft."-Foreword Reviews, starred review
"An Impossibility of Crows functions as a Gothic reminder that, as Kirsten puts it, 'the things we bury do not stay dead.' . . . . For those who find relief in the shadows, Kirsten Kaschock's work offers a necessary, pleasurable dread."-Terry Shepherd
"What does it mean to love someone so completely that you would reshape the natural world for them? And what happens when that reshaping becomes its own kind of violence? These questions sit at the heart of Kirsten Kaschock's new novel An Impossibility of Crows a book that takes the familiar terrain of maternal devotion and makes it strange, even terrifying."-Ginger Nuts of Horror
"An Impossibility of Crows is a mesmerizing and wholly original novel that scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. Ominous, profound and compulsively readable, a Gothic novel written in crystalline prose. A flat-out knockout."-Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author
"A text of baleful beauty, like its monster, this book is somehow both achingly tender and ruthlessly unsentimental-and about the most sentimentalised aspects of our sadistic culture, too."-China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station
"An Impossibility of Crows is, itself, impossibly lyric and ambitious, an Iliad of parenting, of ambivalence, self-sacrifice and care. A divorce-poem and a tale of scientific obsession-tragic, feminist and sublime as Shelley's Frankenstein, but quick-paced, wry and gorgeous for the 21st century."-Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox and Night Night Fawn
"This book is an intensely moving exploration of the way we risk everything we have for the ones we love and still get it wrong. Agnes and Solo will power my heart for a long time. Every sentence of this novel gives more than I thought possible."-Jac Jemc, author of Empty Theatre and The Grip of It
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Massachusetts
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 212 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
358 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62534-925-5 (9781625349255)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Kirsten Kaschock, a Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of one previous novel, Sleight, and six poetry collections: Unfathoms, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, The Dottery, Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer, Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press), and AutoPortrait (as flotsam).
Content
1. An Experience of Crows
2. A Library of Crows
3. A Blot of Crows
4. An Ecstasy of Crows
5. An Utterance of Crows
6. A Development of Crows
7. A Confidence of Crows
8. A Fastening of Crows
9. A Hazard of Crows
10. A Solitude of Crows
Acknowledgments
2. A Library of Crows
3. A Blot of Crows
4. An Ecstasy of Crows
5. An Utterance of Crows
6. A Development of Crows
7. A Confidence of Crows
8. A Fastening of Crows
9. A Hazard of Crows
10. A Solitude of Crows
Acknowledgments