Why did she pack up her car and move cross-country? Drop out of college and return to her hometown? Perhaps she was seized by inspiration, had a Joycean epiphany, was impassioned with love or idealistic zeal. As Cicero wrote, "What moves of itself is eternal, who can deny that this is the nature of spirits?" In Something Came Over Me, Eva Murray shares ten stories about women in transition and explores what moves them. Crystal follows her husband all over the world as he harvests organs in disaster sites; and Peg drives the back roads of her haunted memories in Amish Michigan, chasing the very daemon that chases her. In "Freelancing in the Land of Gentry," Maureen gets paid to date and write about it--and she's so hungry for cash, she prays he picks up the check. And in "Aftershock," an Afghani soldier risks his life for his adopted America by translating Taliban documents in his war-torn homeland. He throws a lifeline across the globe to his former teacher, who navigates the puerile privileged in San Francisco. Murray's stories render the human heart resilient, surprising; the human character, tender and vast. "Eva Murray is a rare talent. She has an extraordinary ear for language, and with her gorgeous prose that moves beautifully, reminiscent of Edna O'Brien, her fiction has much to offer readers." Karen Regen-Tuero, Glimmer Train author

Izzy O'Hara, a loveable misfit, as wily, hapless and tender as Moll Flanders, suffers a nervous tic that's twice misdiagnosed as S.A.D. When she thinks she sees her estranged brother Tommy on her smoke break in downtown San Francisco, she embarks on an odyssey that takes her into her past, the history of American punk rock, and across the American West. She's not sure if it was Tommy, who ran off with a rockabilly band in the Eighties, or was it Ray Z. Omaha of the Twelve Steppers, the singer he mimicked? Is it her vision and everybody looks like somebody else, or is she just S.A.D.? Then those pesky calls from the Governor begin. Time to move to another big city. In Chicago, her luck is double-edged: She is still being followed, yet she herself follows Ray Z. Omaha and his band to solve the mystery of Tommy. But one too many rough nights find her on the run again, this time back home to Nebraska, where she thinks she begins to see things more clearly. She follows Ray's band on tour westward, retrieving clues from her troubled past, tracing the roots of American punk all the way to Hermosa Beach and East L.A, while falling for the bass player Dirk. While Izzy is on her odyssey, her mother dies suddenly. The loss of this sweet, steady figure devastates her. Ray flies in for the funeral and promises he will find Tommy. Izzy returns to San Francisco where Ray has another surprise, but it's the good kind-not, "Hi, I'm a Rockabilly Vampire." Her vision holds the key to their survival. The character Ray Z. Omaha is based on the life of Charlie Burton of Lincoln, Nebraska, and 10 of Charlie Burton and The Twelve Steppers' songs are included.