In the Lake of the Woods

By Tim O’Brien

A remarkable novel from the National Book Award-winning author of ‘Going After Cacciato’ and ‘The Things They Carried’, which combines the power of the finest Vietnam fiction with the tension of a many-layered mystery.

In a remote lakeside cabin deep in the Minnesota forests, Kathy Wade is comforting her husband John, an ambitious politician, after a devastating electoral defeat.

Then one night she vanishes, and gradually the search for Kathy becomes a voyage into the darkest corners of John Wade’s life, a life of deception and deceit – the life of a man able to escape everything but the chains of his darkest secret.

Format: Paperback
Release Date: 24 Sep 2015
Pages: 320
ISBN: 978-0-00-654395-4
Tim O’Brien was born in Minnesota and served as a foot soldier in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, and after graduate studies at Harvard worked as a reporter for the Washington Post. When ‘If I Die in a Combat Zone’ was published in 1973, it established him as one of the leading American writers of his generation, a status that was confirmed when ‘Going After Cacciato’ won the National Book Award for fiction.

”'Masterfully oblique, inventive and deeply unsettling…a riveting exploration of a tormented and wounded psyche” - Sunday Times

”'Calling Tim O’Brien a Vietnam War novelist is a bit like saying Joseph Conrad was a Polish guy who wrote some good sea tales” - Esquire

”'Striking, telling, deeply unsettling. A novel about the moral effects of suppressing a true war story, about the unforgiveable uses of history, about what happens when you try to pretend that history no longer exists” - New York Times Book Review