For Love
Page 37
A Richard & Judy Summer Read
Maybe some people just like to keep things private. Secret, I guess you’d say.
Love came late to Meri, but in a rush: she met Nathan at thirty-six, he moved in a month later, and they married a month after that. Now they are moving to New England and a house of their own – a new life that Meri is not sure she even wants. She loves her husband, but feels there may be trouble ahead. Nathan, however, is boyishly excited that their next-door neighbour is the eminent Senator Tom Naughton, a political hero of his, now in his seventies. The Senator is nowhere to be seen, but Meri strikes up an unexpected friendship with his wife, the elegant Delia, sensing that she has much to learn from her – about marriage, love and motherhood. But soon she comes close to a terrible breach of trust that could ruin everything.
‘An incredible story of the dangers of trying to live lives through others. Perfect book-club material’
Easy Living
‘Shock, deceit, desire and despair come together at once in a way that feels simply like fate … A clever storyteller with a penchant for the unexpected’
New York Times
‘This addictive read had me biting my lip with foreboding’
Eve
The Lake Shore Limited
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?
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.
‘Miller dives deep into the darkest corners of marital and family conflict. Her books are dark yet optimistic, scary yet warm’
Julie Myerson, Mail on Sunday
‘A clever storyteller with a penchant for the unexpected’
New York Times
The Arsonist
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.
www.bloomsbury.com/suemiller
First published in Great Britain by Doubleday 1993
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1993 by Sue Miller
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ePub ISBN 978 1 4088 5759 5
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
To find out more about our authors and their books please visit www.bloomsbury.com where you will find extracts, author interviews and details of forthcoming events, and to be the first to hear about latest releases and special offers, sign up for our newsletters here.