In Nod, her ninth book of fiction, American novelist and poet Fanny Howe explores sibling rivalry within a family that, in the wake of World War II, is both disintegrating and stumbling into the terrible, dark adulthood of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Yet for all of the dark forces at work in Howe's novel, she presents also a world of wonder, of sexual awakenings interlinked with the Irish countryside and culture in which the girls grow up, the strange stories and myths they hear from the Norwegian north and retell through their own highly-wrought imaginations. The central figures of this fiction, Irene and Cloda, interact with one another and the man who has encamped in their ghost-, now guest-room, as if playing out the lives of the Brontes to a packed theater audience. At the core of this tale, however, is a deep emptiness, a loneliness created from cultural events and both their mother's and father's refusal to accept the fates that overwhelm the sisters in their small Irish encampment. Both seek desperately to escape, Irene to her imaginary world of art and adulthood, Cloda to some dark magic corner where she can learn to become something of worth.