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From the author of While I Was Gone, a stunning new novel that showcases Sue Miller's singular gift for exposing the nerves that lie hidden in marriages and families, and the hopes and regrets that lie buried in the hearts of women.
Maine, 1919. Georgia Rice, who has cared for her father and two siblings since her mother's death, is diagnosed, at nineteen, with tuberculosis and sent away to a sanitarium. Freed from the burdens of caretaking, she discovers a nearly lost world of youth and possibility, and meets the doomed young man who will become her lover.
Vermont, the present. On the heels of a divorce, Catherine Hubbard, Georgia's granddaughter, takes up residence in Georgia's old house. Sorting through her own affairs, Cath stumbles upon the true story of Georgia's life and marriage, and of the misunderstanding upon which she built a lasting love.
With the tales of these two women—one a country doctor's wife with a haunting past, the other a twice-divorced San Francisco schoolteacher casting about at midlife for answers to her future—Miller offers us a novel of astonishing richness and emotional depth. Linked by bitter disappointments, compromise, and powerful grace, the lives of Georgia and Cath begin to seem remarkably similar, despite their distinctly different times: two young girls, generations apart, motherless at nearly the same age, thrust into early adulthood, struggling with confusing bonds of attachment and guilt; both of them in marriages that are not what they seem, forced to make choices that call into question the very nature of intimacy, faithfulness, betrayal, and love. Marvelously written, expertly told, The World Below captures the shadowy half-truths of the visible world, and the beauty and sorrow submerged beneath the surfaces of our lives—the lost world of the past, our lost hopes for the future. A tour de force from one of our most beloved storytellers.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Xenia Henrie
reviewed The World Below on October 07, 2012 The World Below
Sue Miller's characters read; this makes them far more interesting, more complex than most American characters. In this novel, the central character reads letters of her great-grandmother who had been institutionalized at nineteen. This led to a lifetime, a marriage, of unsuspected depths and doubts.
Such reading characters should also interest Goodreads afficianados. In the World Below, the life of the TB asylum is exposed, in a sense. All that time, nothing to do: of course relationships developed, sex happened. The main alternatives to sex may have been meals and reading. Asylum meals never made five-star ratings, so that left sex and reading.
For nearly forty years I taught at a small college where my Division Chair had been diagnosed with TB in the fifties. He claimed it was sheer chance that he went not to a surgeon, but to an internist. He felt a surgeon might well have killed him. The internist sent him to an asylum--where he read three to five books a week for over a year. One would be hard pressed to achieve such a literary education at a four year college. Was TB God's gift to literature?
Perhaps I should not add, my paternal relatives populated the town below the lake, below Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. As a child I fished on Quabbin, and in many sections of the northern part where fishing was allowed you could see stone walls running under the lake, fifteen feet down, to where the depth obscured them.
I invited Sue Miller to read at my Bristol Community College, which she did, in October, 2006, in our largest room, filled with a hundred students and colleagues. In a black jacket and with hair curly, she could not stay for lunch because she took her god-daughter out to lunch. A wonderful reading, from this book, the longest passage some twenty minutes. She engaged my students, many returning women and mothers in their twenties. She answered questions articulately; for example, she has a small diary, 6" by 2.5", of her grandmother's, mostly banal, but: "I would like to lie in the earth. Today I seemed doomed to disappointment."
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