When long-hidden secrets about his past come to light, John Wade—a Vietnam veteran and recent candidate for the U.S. Senate—retreats with his wife, Kathy, to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, Kathy mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness. As a search is begun, several explanations, all of them disturbing, rise to the surface in this unforgettable story about the vagaries of memory, love, and deception.
“A gut-punch of a novel... O’Brien turns the thriller form inside out.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer“A memorable mystery story charged with haunting ambiguity... If any American novelist is creating more beautifully written, emotionally harrowing tales than Tim O’Brien, I don’t know who it could be.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Serious, gracefully written, and at the same time, as gripping as a thriller.” —Wall Street Journal
“Not only brilliant but riveting... In the Lake of the Woods is not only a book you don’t turn away from, it’s a book you can’t put down. It comes not just as a literary event but almost a literary miracle.” —San Jose Mercury News
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Was she murdered? Did she run away? Instead of answering these questions, O'Brien raises even more as he slowly reveals past lives and long-hidden secrets. Included in this third-person narrative are "interviews" with the couple's friends and family as well as footnoted excerpts from a mix of fictionalized newspaper reports on the case and real reports pertaining to historical events--a mélange that lends the novel an eerie sense of verisimilitude. If Kathy's disappearance is at the heart of this work, then John's involvement in a My Lai-type massacre in Vietnam is its core, and O'Brien uses it to demonstrate how wars don't necessarily end when governments say they do. In the Lake of the Woods may not be true, but it feels true--and for Tim O'Brien, that's true enough. --Alix Wilber
Tim O’Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer Finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century, and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.
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