Fiction. 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.