Books published by publisher The Viking Press, New York

This unusual novel is set in rural Derbyshire in the old manor house, Thackers, where the Babington family and their servant, Cicely Taberner, lived when Elizabeth I was Queen of England. The descendants of the Taberners have farmed the land through the centuries, and to the Taberners of the present day comes Penelope, their great-niece, a sensitive, imaginative girl, who is aware of other layers of time. With her awakened vision she sees people of the past move in their daily tasks among those of the present, and behind the contented life of the household of Cicely and Barnabas Taberner she finds the old tragedy of Anthony Babington and his plot to save Mary, Queen of Scots, being re-enacted. The farm kitchen where Penelope sits with her great-aunt and great-uncle is the home of those others who once lived there. Their desires and fears, their courage and strength enter the girl's mind; their voices float up from the garden and she is caught up into their life. Time is annihilated, and she lives in the closing years of the sixteenth century remembering little of her modern life, until she returns from her traveling in time bearing the anxieties and dreams of the other world. The life of two widely separated times in history - the Elizabethan and the present - goes on simultaneously, each invisible to the other. And only Penelope can pierce the veil, sharing the tumultuous experiences of the Babington family three hundred years ago.

This is a wonderful book, if wonderful still means full of wonder. It has more conventional virtues as well. Mr. Bellow has taken a legendary time in the United States- the twenties and the depression, and a city, Chicago, that was a legend in that time and set his Ulysses to learning life there. But this is an American legend and an American hero and the author has taken Augie, either in person or his friends, through almost every American experience of the period- slum life, high life, organizing unions, riding the rails, selling paint, grooming dogs, student, thief, etc. as well as lover, friend and a most human human being. The people surrounding him are no less varied and rich in qualities. Through it all Augie moves trying to find his individuality and his destiny. Power after power reaches toward him, or touches him, and teaches him more about himself. It is a book of extremes and superlatives -- rough, funny, sad, wild, tender, vulgar, pure- written in a style that is a mid point between stream of consciousness and conversation- as though Augie were thinking to himself in words..... A gorgeous job, with an enormous impact- both intellectual and emotional- which critical attention and publisher pressure may help to carry to the big market.

Kirkus Reviews: "In this engrossing novel, KD Kern presents a well-written and absorbing monster tale."When shy seventeen-year-old Riley Borden's abusive stepfather is brutally murdered before her eyes, she bravely tells the authorities exactly who did it: a monster. Not surprisingly the evidence points to her and she's shipped off to a rural Northern California mental institution, leaving her ten-year-old sister in mortal danger at the hands of her deranged aunt. Bedeviled by inmates, emotionally vanquished, Riley becomes convinced that her life is over... but when she awakens to a presence that manifests as the very creature that got her here, with it comes a serendipitous escape and a desperate journey to save her sister—and along the way she learns that the primeval being that calls her soul home may hold a secret more ominous than anything she ever feared.