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A novel
by Sue Miller
From the best-selling author of While I Was Gone and The Senator's Wife, a superb new novel about a family and a community tested when an arsonist begins setting fire to the homes of the summer people in a small New England town.
Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for fifteen years, Frankie Rowley has come home—home to the small New Hampshire village 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. Then another house burns, and another, always the houses of the summer people. In a town where people have never bothered to lock their doors, social fault lines are opened, and neighbors begin to regard one another with suspicion. Against this backdrop of menace and fear, Frankie begins a passionate, unexpected affair with the editor of the local paper, a romance that progresses with exquisite tenderness and heat toward its own remarkable risks and revelations.
Suspenseful, sophisticated, rich in psychological nuance and emotional insight, The Arsonist is vintage Sue Miller—a finely wrought novel about belonging and community, about how and where one ought to live, about what it means to lead a fulfilling life. One of our most elegant and engrossing novelists at her inimitable best.
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"A provocative novel about the boundaries of relationships and the tenuous alliance between locals and summer residents when a crisis is at hand... Miller, a pro at explicating family relationships as well as the fragile underpinnings of mature romance, brilliantly explores how her characters define what 'home' means to them and the lengths they will go to protect it." - Publishers Weekly
"With her trademark elegant prose and masterful command of subtle psychological nuance, Miller explores the tensions between the summer people and the locals in a small New Hampshire town... In this suspenseful and romantic novel, Miller delicately parses the value of commitment and community, the risky nature of relationships, and the yearning for meaningful work." - Booklist
"The heart of the story really lies in Sylvie and Alfie's marriage... Miller's portrayal of early Alzheimer's and the toll it takes on a family is disturbingly accurate and avoids the sentimental uplift prevalent in issue-oriented fiction... Miller captures all the complicated nuances of a family in crisis." - Kirkus
This information about The Arsonist was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Debi Milligan
Both critically acclaimed and loved by readers, Sue Miller is recognized internationally for her elegant and sharply realistic accounts of the contemporary family. Her books have been widely translated and published in 22 countries around the world. The Good Mother (1986), the first of her ten novels, was an immediate bestseller (more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts). Subsequent novels include three Book-of- the-Month main selections: Family Pictures (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah's Book Club selection), and The Senator's Wife. Her latest novel is The Arsonist. Her nonfiction book, The Story of My Father, was heralded by BookPage as a "beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness ...
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