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.

Reviews of In the Lake of the Woods

- ‘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