Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids

Stories

By: Leyna Krow

Narrated by: Amara Brady, Carlotta Brentan, Kristen Sieh, Aspen Vincent, Frankie Corzo, Helen Laser, Amy Jensen, Dominique Salvacion, Lauren Fortgang, Emma Galvin, Kimberly Farr, Gilli Messer, Rebecca Lowman

“A gorgeous book that also serves as a series of unanswerable, probing questions: How did we get here? How will we move forward? Can we still love, despite the wreckage? This is devastating work, and I mean that as a compliment. Very rarely have I come across a set of stories so genuinely moving. A searing collection that attempts to place the world delicately in our fumbling, undeserving hands.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025: Lit Hub, The Millions

What do we owe our family and friends in times of wild uncertainty?

That’s the question the women of Leyna Krow’s beguiling, darkly fabulist story collection grapple with as they strive to be good mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, wives, and companions in a world that is constantly shifting around them. Set in the Pacific Northwest, these stories blend high concept magic with the sometimes subtle, other times glaring, realities of climate change.

As protagonists contend with doppelgänger babies, hordes of time travelers, mysterious portals, and supernatural siblings, there lurks in the background the effects of the region’s rapidly shifting environment. There are wildfires, wind storms, unrelenting heat, disrupted butterfly migration patterns, a new plague, and a catastrophe on the slopes of Mount Rainier that reverberates through three generations of a single family over the course of a half dozen linked stories.

With Krow’s signature blend of sardonic whimsy and unsettling insight, Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids imagines the rules to be broken, choices to be made, and even crimes to be had for the sake of the people, and places, we love.

©2025 Leyna Krow (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Sinkhole grapples with the changing nature of the land we live upon, along with the everlasting urge to be in relation with one another, treating that desire as imperative and necessary even in the face of our planet’s decay. Each story is satisfying in its own right and intrinsic to the collection as a whole: at times speculative, at times starkly realistic, the world heats and floods cascade, and still the beating hearts of humanity continue to hope and fear and dream and love and love and love.”—Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

“In her second collection of short fiction, Krow amplifies surreal elements as she tells stories of ordinary lives. Her characters grapple with deadly viruses, climate change, and disasters of the Anthropocene’s wilderness.”—The Millions, “Most Anticipated: The Great 2025 Winter Book Preview”

“A distressed graduate student tries to warn her community about an impending mudslide. A mother creates a bond with her new child after he appears out of thin air. A scourge of butterflies threatens to destroy the ecosystem of a town even as it unites a grudging teenager and a local scientist. In these surreal stories, Krow imagines families facing both environmental collapse and the necessity of caring for one another in the most desperate times.”—Alta