In the Lake of the Woods

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

‘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

About the author

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.