Your lover dies. You fetch his ashes South, back home to the rural conditions you long ago made your way away from in order to preserve your nature in the exquisite scandal of its difference. You inter the cremains in the very place most forbidden to you - within the severe boundaries your kin have devised for their own kind to be laid to rest.

But your deed was done in secret, of course, and now you must return to the site of your trespass, a year thereafter, somehow helpless to do other than - at your very peril, at whatever the quality of the cost - make your infamy known. These are the terms that inaugurate the heroic prospect of this much-anticipated second novel, a work of superb innocence, of boundless charm, and of the durable - and liberating - love of one human being for another. Author of the widely heralded Where She Was, Anderson Ferrell gives us the spirituality of our wound where others would give us the pettishness of their injury. Here is an account confected from the plainest humility - and truth.

Its ironies (none more delectable or more marvelous than what becomes the unguessable destiny of what was left of the deceased) and its sometimes colossal comedy (get set for the cautionary tale of the frog-infested washing machine bespeaking the wages of unfettered grief) come to seem the ordinary measure, and necessary redress, of gorgeously loving lives lived to the hilt.

Tenderhearted, decent-minded - yes, decent! - its pages wide open to us in the sweet welcome of their appeal, Home for the Day is a gentle, gently shining, one-of-a-kind gem - an excellence as art, a completion as experience.