World Below » (Reprint)

Sue Miller is an expert in limning the pain of endings, but if this were the extent of her talents, she probably would not be as successful as she is. In Miller's books, one broken relationship often leads to the development of another. Her stories may not offer pat answers and perfect love stories, but readers find something more rewarding in the end.

From the author of While I Was Gone, a stunning new novel that showcases Sue Miller's singular gift for exposing the nerves that lie hidden in marriages and families, and the hopes and regrets that lie buried in the hearts of women.

Maine, 1919.

Book Magazine

The World Below takes its title from something the narrator, Catherine, sees on a childhood fishing expedition with her grandfather: an entire Vermont town submerged after a dam was built. As a divorced adult, Catherine returns to the area and discovers her grandmother's diaries in the house she has inherited, and she comes to associate the mystery and tranquillity of the town in the lake with the lives of her grandparents. Miller evokes the couple's small-town idyll " the lilac and fidelity" of their lives together with details so plain as to be absolutely convincing, such as Catherine's grandmother's practical lesson in "how to sew on a coat button tight enough to stay, loose enough to be workable." The author also captures the exceptional and the frightening, summing up the terror of a violent storm in a single detail: "A wooden chair came skidding drunkenly across the yard, stopped, then hurried on." Here are lives scrupulously observed and reflected upon, and the result is that we read with a kind of greedy rapture, captivated by the austerities and small pleasures of daily life as if they were the wonders of Aladdin.
Penelope Mesic