Synopsis
For nearly two decades, since the publication of her iconic first novel, The Good Mother, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters. In each of her novels, Miller has written with exquisite precision about the experience of grace in daily life -the sudden, epiphanic recognition of the extraordinary amid the ordinary- as well as the sharp and unexpected motions of the human heart away from it, toward an unruly netherworld of upheaval and desire. But never before have Miller s powers been keener or more transfixing than they are in Lost in the Forest, a novel set in the vineyards of Northern California that tells the story of a young girl who, in the wake of a tragic accident, seeks solace in a damaging love affair with a much older man.
Eva, a divorced and happily remarried mother of three, runs a small bookstore in...
The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Kathryn Harrison
You don't need to read a book with a title like Lost in the Forest to guess that Sue Miller will be using it to acquaint you with a wolf and a version of Red Riding Hood, a girl teetering on the dangerous cusp between childhood and adulthood, innocence and initiation. But if at first her new novel seems to revisit an overly familiar story, she quickly offers proof that it will be in her own distinctive style -- that it will, in fact, be one of her strongest, most satisfying books. Miller has always been adept at rendering the complexities of family life, the way even well-intentioned, decent people can't walk across a room without wounding at least one person they love. But while some of her plots (that of While I Was Gone, for example) can be cluttered and occasionally clumsy, Lost in the Forest has a seemingly effortless grace; Miller quickly captures and never loses our attention.