The stories in The Mother Garden are at once vividly realistic and infused with the bizarre—a man uses a chicken egg to test whether or not he is ready for fatherhood; a daughter plants a garden of mothers to replace her own; the family's ghosts literally fall through the ceiling, disrupting daily life; a woman finds her father sleeping in the desert after twenty-six years of living without him. People stumble in relationships, start families, struggle with illness, learn to mourn—and as in life, these acts are consuming, magical, and disorienting.