The Lost Mother A Novel

Abandoned by his wife, a man tries to protect his family during the Great Depression, in this “powerful” novel by the bestselling author of Songs in Ordinary Time (Publishers Weekly).
 
During the Great Depression, rural Vermont suffers along with the rest of the country, and Henry Talcott, with only occasional work as a butcher, is reduced to moving into a tent on the edge of Black Pond with his two children. Their beautiful but unreliable mother has left them, and Henry is devastated by her desertion. He hasn’t told Thomas or Margaret why she left—or if she will return.
 
Told from twelve-year-old Thomas’s perspective, The Lost Mother follows this shattered family as a wealthy neighbor begins to woo the children as companions for her strange, housebound son, and Henry weighs an unexpected proposition, the consequences of which may cost him everything. “A perfectly lovely story about perfectly awful things” by the New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–nominated author of A Dangerous Woman and Light from a Distant Star, The Lost Mother is “the quietest, subtlest novel that has ever kept [its readers] up into the small hours of the night, unable to look away” (The Washington Post).
 
 

Mary McGarry Morris grew up in Vermont and now lives on the North Shore in Massachusetts. Her first novel, Vanished, was published in 1988 and was nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Dangerous Woman (1991) was chosen by Time magazine as one of the “Five Best Novels of the Year” and was made into a motion picture starring Debra Winger, Barbara Hershey, and Gabriel Byrne. Songs in Ordinary Time (1995) was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, which propelled it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks, and it was adapted for a TV movie starring Sissy Spacek and Beau Bridges. Morris’s other highly acclaimed works include the novels Fiona Range (2000), A Hole in the Universe (2004), The Lost Mother (2005), The Last Secret (2009), and Light from a Distant Star (2011), as well as the play MTL: The Insanity File.