In THE LADIES, a trio of professional mourners contemplates their fate, while their days are consumed by the various rituals of grief and an intense hunger that never seems to be sated. The chorus-like quality of the narrative offers the haunting element of the mythological, where past and present merge and become nearly indistinguishable. In dream-like, crystalline prose, this novel interrogates the complexity of existence, of mourning, of identity, of origins. Winner of the 2016 Noemi Press Book Award.

Sara Veglahn is the author of two novels, The Ladies (winner of the 2016 Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction) and The Mayflies (Dzanc 2014), and hold an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a PhD in literature and creative writing (fiction) from the University of Denver.

"The Ladies reads like a fever dream you wake from hungrily and fall to feasting–fall to dreaming again, hoping to return to the birds and the buckets, to rain and stones and confusions of being, to the marvelously muddied frontier between the living and the dead. Sara Veglahn gives us a lush, thingy, ethereal world all her very own."
— Noy Holland

"From the chrysalis-tomb comes this chorus, these ladies, with voices of green fire and river ice. They speak to us, the living, the as-yet-unwept, of the death world behind the glass and beneath the waves, at the end of night, and they lull, and they terrify. Sara Veglahn's writing gives the crocus a tongue of flame. The Ladies, her latest novel, is a distillate of our dreams and nightmares, a bright offering. To read is to break the surface, to begin the sinking, to find in any moment a great distance opening like a hole in the known."
— Joanna Ruocco