The Distinguished Guest (36 page)

His to her.

Sue Miller was born in Chicago in 1943. She is the bestselling author of eleven previous books including
The Good Mother
,
While I Was Gone
,
The Distinguished
Guest
,
Lost in the Forest
,
The Lake Shore Limited
, the acclaimed memoir
The Story of My Father
and the Richard & Judy hit
The Senator’s Wife
. Her most
recent novel is
The Arsonist
. Sue Miller lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Good Mother

Inventing the Abbotts

Lost in the Forest

Family Pictures

For Love

While I Was Gone

The World Below

The Story of My Father

Lost in the Forest

The Senator’s Wife

The Lake Shore Limited

The Arsonist

Lottie is relieved to have escaped to her mother’s house for the summer because her second marriage, barely begun, is in trouble. Also at home is Cameron, Lottie’s
brother, who has been in love with their neighbour Elizabeth since high school. Elizabeth is married with three children but now, finally, Elizabeth and Cameron embark on a passionate affair. But
as Lottie, Cameron and Elizabeth are reunited, a senseless tragedy befalls them, and Lottie is forced to examine the consequences of what she has done for love.

‘Absolutely flawless … Extraordinary’

Anne Tyler

‘A tour de force by any standards … One reason for Miller’s popularity is that she earns her fans in a time-honoured way: she writes for readers’

Newsweek

‘
For Love
may be the most honest twentieth-century love story we’ve had in a while’

New York Times Book Review

Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put
at risk everything that’s dear to you…

Thirty years ago Jo Becker’s bohemian life ended when she found her best friend brutally murdered. 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 Jo’s life begins to unravel, as she enters a relationship that returns her to the darkest
moments of her past, imperilling all that she loves.

‘A moving story of secrets and lies’

The Times

‘An astonishing mix of the warm, complex and frightening … The stuff of real life that is rarely conveyed in fiction’

Julie Myerson,
Mail on Sunday

‘Beautiful and frightening … Difficult to forget’

New York Times Book Review

What you see in this picture is a woman whose husband might leave her, who might find herself at midlife casting about in her past for answers to her future…

Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroads in her life. Twice divorced, her children are now grown up and scattered across the country. 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 her grandmother’s too. Georgia’s diaries, discovered in the attic,
reveal the true story of her life and marriage, and of the tragic misunderstanding upon which she built a lasting love.
The World Below
tells the parallel stories of two women separated by
generations, but linked by the bitter disappointments and regrets that lurk beneath the surface of their ordinary lives.

‘Miller brings unusual skill in the exploration of women’s hopes and regrets. The careful build-up of detail, and an acute understanding of the facts and feelings
which lie behind disguises, make this a sensitive examination of two private lives’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Candid and thoughtful … A voice of unusual truth and perception’

Eileen Battersby,
Irish Times

‘Miller writes with tremendous subtlety and perception’

Daily Mail

In the spring of 1986, Sue Miller found herself more and more deeply involved in caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer’s disease.
The Story of
My Father
is a profound, deeply moving account of her father’s final days and her own response to it. With care, restraint and consummate skill, Miller writes of her struggles to be fully
with her father in his illness while confronting her own terror of abandonment, and eventually the long, hard work of grieving for him. And through this candid, painful record, she offers a
rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, a powerful meditation on the variable nature of memory and the difficulty of weaving a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life.

‘Beautifully written and moving … Every relative of an Alzheimer’s patient feels this guilt, here painfully anatomised …
The Story of My Father
is the best book of its genre I have ever read’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Much more than a memoir, her book is an exploration of the nature of self and an extraordinary testament to an extraordinary love’

Independent

‘Remarkable for its honesty and courage, and for the muted gallantry with which its subject met the loss of everything that made him human’

Daily Telegraph

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,
and snapped like a twig. His sudden death changes everything. Eva struggles with the terror and desolation of loneliness, and finds 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 Daisy, John’s absence
opens up a whole world of confusion just at the onset of adolescence and blossoming sexuality. And in steps a man only too willing to take advantage.

‘Sue Miller brings unusual skill in the exploration of women’s hopes and regrets’

Daily Telegraph

‘Miller’s novel may be firmly rooted in the domestic, but its dreamy, mesmeric prose gives this tale of grief and loss the quality of a fable’

Daily Mail

‘Meticulously observed and utterly gripping’

Marie Claire

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

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 11
^th
, 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

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 Harper Collins Publishers 1996

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 1995 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 5764 9

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