SUE MILLER

Miller takes readers deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their stubborn, unyielding love.

There's this set of things everyone expects from you... Since her boyfriend Gus was killed in 9/11, Billy has been pretending. It is easier for her to stay silent and go through the motions of grief than to tell the truth: that she was planning to leave Gus, and that his death left her feeling a mixture of ambivalence and anguish that she is still struggling to resolve. Drawing from her experience, Billy writes The Lake Shore Limited. The opening night of the play brings together three people whose lives intersect and interweave with Billy's: Leslie, Gus's older sister, haunted by his death and constantly aware of what could have been; Rafe, the actor who brings the joy and sadness of his own marriage into his role; and Sam, a recently divorced man who is irresistibly drawn to Billy's distinctive, enigmatic beauty. Together these four voices create a mesmerizing novel of entanglements, connections and inconsolable losses.

That's what the play was about, she was thinking abruptly. The wish to imagine what life could be, how it could change, if you were unencumbered. Did everyone who was married do this from time to time, imagine an unencumbered life? Three years after the death of her younger brother Gus, Leslie still thinks about what might have been: if Gus hadn't got on that plane on September 11th, if her husband understood the nature of her grief, if she had made different choices. As she sits down to watch The Lake Shore Limited, a disquietingly autobiographical play written by Gus's former girlfriend Billy, she can't help but wonder whether she also holds on to the past, and whether she really knows Billy at all. Meanwhile, Sam, Leslie's divorced friend, finds in the play inescapable echoes of his troubled life and begins to fall for Billy's distinctive, enigmatic beauty. A powerful love story; a mesmerising tale of entanglements, connections and inconsolable losses; a marvellous reflection on the meaning of grace and the uses of sorrow, in life and in art: The Lake Shore Limited is Sue Miller at her dazzling best.

Anna is a divorcee, a piano teacher, and a devoted mother. She longs for both passion and expression in her life and music. When she meets Leo, a wild, impulsive artist, she embarks on an intensely sexual relationship with him which threatens to destroy all that she once held dear.

Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroads in her life. Twice divorced, she has three children who are now grown up and scattered. Then news comes that she has inherited her grandmother Georgia's home in Vermont. There, Catherine finds not only the ghosts of her own past but those of Georgia as well, whose diaries reveal a deep secret and a tragic misunderstanding.

Fleeing the end of an affair, and troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for fifteen years, Frankie Rowley comes home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident? Over the weeks that follow, as Frankie comes to recognise her father's slow failing and her mother's desperation, and she tentatively gets to know the new owner of the local newspaper, another house burns, and then another. These frightening events open the deep social fault lines in the town and raise questions about how and where one ought to live, and what it really means to lead a fulfilling life.

From the author of While I Was Gone, a magnificent new novel that showcases Sue Miller's singular talent for exposing the nerves that lie hidden in marriages, families, and the lives of women. Maine, 1919. Georgia Rice, who has cared fro her father and two siblings since her mother's death, is diagnosed, at 19, with tuberculosis and sent away to a sanitarium. Freed from the burdens of caretaking, she discovers a nearly lost world of youth and possibility, and meets the doomed young man who will become her lover. Vermont, the present. On the heels of a divorce, Catherine Hubbard, Georgia's granddaughter, takes up residence in Georgia's old house. Sorting through her own affairs, Catherine stumbles upon the true story of Georgia's life and marriage, and the misunderstanding upon which she build a lifelong love. In the stories of these two women—linked by bitter disappointments, compromist, and powerful grace—Sue Miller offers us a novel of astonishing richness and emotional depth. The World Below captures the shadowy half-truths of the visible world, and the beauty and sorrow submerged beneath the surfaces of our lives—the lost world of the past, our lost hopes for the future. An extraordinary novel from one of our finest storytellers.

Catherine Hubbard inherits her grandmother Georgia's home in Vermont. There she discovers diaries which reveal Georgia's first encounter with a young doctor and the tragic misunderstanding that lies at the heart of their relationship.

One minute John is the cornerstone of Eva's world, rock to his two teenage stepdaughters and his own son Theo; the next he is tossed through the air in a traffic accident. His sudden death changes everything. Eva struggles with the desolation of loneliness, finding herself drawn back to her untrustworthy ex-husband; Emily, the eldest daughter, grapples with her new-found independence and responsibility. Little Theo can only begin to fathom the permanence of his father's death. But for the middle child Daisy, John's absence opens up a whole world of confusion. Just at the onset of adolescence and blossoming sexuality, Daisy is exposed to the terrifying duplicity of life, the instability that hovers just beyond the safety of parental love, and the powerlessness of that love to protect or even console her. In steps a man only too willing to take advantage of her emotions. Lost in the Forest is a powerful and gorgeously layered testament to the fluidity of life and the web of connections that bind us, divide us, and drive us on.A finely observed portrait of marriage and family; an intensely sensual journey through the consuming realms of grief and sex; and an unforgettable evocation of adolescent yearning and vulnerability, this is Sue Miller at her inimitable best.

After fifteen years working in East Africa, Frankie Rowley returns to the New Hampshire village where her family has always spent their summers. But the tranquility she's expecting proves short lived when, on the very night she arrives, a mysterious arsonist begins targeting the homes of other summer residents. As this seemingly idyllic community becomes increasingly on edge, Frankie also has to deal with her father's declining health--and begins a passionate affair with the editor of a local paper that will yield its own remarkable risks and revelations. Suspenseful, sophisticated, and finely wrought, "The Arsonist" is an artfully nuanced and deeply emotional novel about a family and a community tested, about how and where one ought to live, and about what it means to lead a fulfilling life.

Thirty years ago Jo Becker's bohemian life ended when she found her best friend brutally murdered in the house they shared in Cambridge. Now Jo has everything: work she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters, and a beautiful home. But when an old friend settles in her small town, the fabric of her life begins to unravel and Jo hesitantly enters a relationship that returns her to the darkest moments of her past, imperilling all that she loves.

A reissue of the powerful and troubling debut sensation - which spent over six months at top of the New York Times bestseller list on its original publication thirty years agoRecently divorced, Anna Dunlap has two passionate attachments: her daughter, four-year-old Molly, and her lover, Leo, the man who makes her feel beautiful - and sexual - for the first time. Swept away by happiness and passion, Anna feels she has everything she's ever wanted.Then come the shocking charges that would threaten her new love, her new family - that force her to prove she is a good mother