The Crane Wife’s Daughters

The house remembers. So do the daughters. When Hanae Mori dies in a crumbling home on the Irish cliffs, her four daughters—Aisling, Clíodhna, Rei, and Sao—come back to Kilduff to bury her and to face what they swore they never would: the Crane Wife story that shaped their childhood. They have seven days to settle the estate and finish the weaving their mother left on the loom. But feathers turn up where no birds can reach. Music plays from a box that hasn't worked in years. Old letters breathe new truths. And the greenhouse glass fogs with wing-shaped prints, as if the house itself is exhaling memories. Half Irish, half Japanese, the sisters carry different versions of the same inheritance—grief, silence, duty, hunger for a life that fits. As they pull at threads of family myth and Catholic shame, each woman must decide what to keep, what to burn, and what to finally speak aloud. The Crane Wife's Daughters is a richly atmospheric novel of mythic realism—a book-club gothic about sisters, the stories that claim us, and the fierce work of remaking a home. For readers of literary fiction with folklore bones: moody, tender, and ultimately blazing with hope. Content notes: themes of grief, faith, and reclamation; no graphic violence.