Four characters beckon you into this new novel from Sue Miller. First among them is Wilhelmina—Billy—Gertz, small as a child, fiercely independent, powerfully committed to her work as a playwright. The story itself centers on The Lake Shore Limited—a play Billy has written about an imagined terrorist bombing of that train as it pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and about a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife, who is traveling on it. Billy had waited in just such a way on 9/11 to hear whether her lover, Gus, was on one of the planes used in the attack.
The novel moves from the snow-filled woods of Vermont to the rainy brick sidewalks of Boston as the lives of the other characters intersect and interweave with Billy’s: Leslie, Gus’s sister, still driven by grief years after her brother’s death; Rafe, the actor who rises to greatness in a performance inspired by a night of incandescent lovemaking; and Sam, a man irresistibly drawn to Billy after he sees the play that so clearly displays the terrible conflicts and ambivalence of her situation.
How Billy has come to create the play out of these emotions, how it is then created anew on the stage, how the performance itself touches and changes the other characters’ lives—these form the thread that binds them all together and drives the novel compulsively forward.
"A ghost wanders through Sue Miller’s calmly perceptive new novel, The Lake Shore Limited; a character long gone, whose absence still affects and motivates those who knew him. He is Gus, a young man who died in a plane on what this book calls ’Nine-Eleven,’ and as an absent character he is shaped and perhaps changed by those who remember him.... Miller is a remarkably graceful writer who sweeps you up in her flow of words, in her ability to make a character seem like someone we know." —The Seattle Times
