Polly's Ghost — Abby Frucht

In life, Polly Baymiller was a fierce and passionate woman ardently in love with her husband and her three sets of twins. Why should she be any different in death?

Polly's Ghost begins when Polly, an ethereal, glimpses her nine-year-old son, Tip, for the first time since she died giving birth to him. He's the only baby she never got to hold, to kiss, or to guide from one uncertain moment to the next deliberate one, and it is Tip she has missed most fervently in the years she has spent learning to be a ghost.

Love, Polly comes to realize, is not a state of mind but a way of being. One must act on the feeling in order to make it count. And act she does, taking bold steps from "above" to make sure that Tip has the courage and curiosity he needs to make his own precious way on Earth. Meanwhile, Polly -- drawn into and out of the earthly stories of the unfolding lives of other people -- follows her own path, away from a tormented ghostliness toward an abundant peace.

It is a testament to Abby Frucht's talent that this novel explores so ecstatically and yet so bracingly that most sentimental of all subjects -- the relationship between mother and child. Polly's Ghost is a stunning successor to Life Before Death, which The Boston Globe hailed as a "breathtakingly beautiful story."