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A Catalog of Small Cruelties
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781961841932
Publisher: Shady Oak Press
Published: May 23 2026
Pages: 440
Weight: 1.29
Height: 0.89 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
There are some griefs so complete they begin to invent their own evidence.
When twenty-eight-year-old architect Violet Holloway wakes from a coma after a devastating car accident, she remembers three dead children no one else believes ever existed. Not her polished attorney husband, Silas Holloway. Not her exhausted social worker sister, Piper Langston. Not the doctors, the police, or the photographs that insist Violet had been alone that night.
Back home in their affluent Midwestern suburb, Violet begins writing a private manuscript she calls A Catalog of Small Cruelties-a meditation on motherhood, memory, neglect, and the terrible things people allow to happen to children when no one is looking.
Then the bodies begin appearing.
A disgraced foster parent abandoned in an orchard house.
A father left on a frozen trail.
A woman discovered beside a riverbank.
A corpse arranged inside a library after closing.
Another found at a campground swallowed by fog.
Each victim shares a chilling connection: somewhere in the exhausted late-night conversations of Piper's child welfare caseload, their names had once surfaced beside accusations of neglect.
As detectives close in and the city spirals into fear, Violet's grief begins to look less like trauma and more like design. Because the deeper her manuscript goes, the clearer one horrifying truth becomes:
Violet is not simply documenting the tragedy.She is curating it.
Haunting, literary, and razor-sharp, A Catalog of Small Cruelties is a psychologically devastating suspense novel about invented motherhood, moral obsession, and the stories people tell themselves to survive the unbearable.
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