Bitter Lake A Novel by Ann Harleman

In this novel set in a mill town with the tangled greenery of Pennsylvania's wooded hills as backdrop, Judith Hutchins and her daughters struggle with the latest disappearance of Gort—fisherman, astronomer, and sometime husband and father. Headstrong and severe, fourteen-year-old Lil cannot accept her father's absence or her mother's reaction to it. Judith, devoting herself to a new job to keep the family going, finds herself involved with a lover, while Lil takes matters into her own hands, determined to find her father and bring him to account.

Told in the alternating voices of Judith and Lil, the novel is a story of the resilience of love, of forgiveness in families, of the roundabout ways in which people connect.

"Harleman is that rare novelist who can make the language new again so that individual moments come startlingly alive as they might in the hands of a gifted poet. . . . There is a unique combination of toughness and humanity in Bitter Lake."—John Yount

"What I liked most about this novel was the sensibility that made the characters interesting and appealing people in search of answers to important questions about how they will live their lives."—Rosellen Brown

"Harleman gets it all right: dead-on dialogue, images so apt and original they make you stop and read them again, and suspense so gripping it propels you forward."—Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand

ANN HARLEMAN'S collection, Happiness, won the 1993 University of Iowa Short Fiction Award. She has been a Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellow and received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award in 1991. She is a Research Associate in the American Civilization Department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she makes her home.

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Bitter Lake
ISBN 0-87074-404-6 cloth $22.50
ISBN 0-87074-405-4 paper $12.95

LC 96-27939. 6x9. 264 pp.
Fiction.

Publication Date: October 1996.

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