The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux: A Novel - Hardcover

Billy Collins author of "Picnic, Lightning"From the question mark of its opening riddle to the exclamation point of its final revelation, David Long's new novel sustains an ability to hold its reader hostage. A story of two strangers in the night on a quest to understand first the past, then one another, "The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux" is a tense, deeply nocturnal tale of intrigue -- smartly written and always true to the essential mysteriousness of experience.

Ducking out of choir rehearsal at his New England prep school, Miles Fanning rushes to a rendezvous with his girlfriend Carly. But Carly doesn't show up at the appointed time -- and is never seen again. From this haunting episode, David Long, praised for his "poetic, resonant, unpretentious" prose "(The Boston Globe)," has crafted an elegant and gripping novel about the effect of not knowing on a tragedy's survivors. Twenty-four years later, Fanning owns an independent record label in Seattle. He is enduring a trial separation from his wife and feeling increasingly disconnected and withdrawn when he receives an anonymous e-mail message from a woman who turns out to be Carly's sister, Julia Lamoreaux. They meet at a hotel bar -- Fanning, who never gives a thought to the past, and Julia, who is obsessed by it. Then silence, until a few weeks later, when Fanning, a frequent insomniac, answers a late-night phone call. It's Julia. So begins a phone and e-mail correspondence in which Julia, chain-smoking and caustic-tongued, tells Fanning of the devastating events set into motion by her sister's never-explained disappearance: in particular, the slow demise of their deeply religious father. Fanning is captivated, and so are we, by Julia's offbeat intensity. His heightening attraction to Julia causes old questions to flare: What "did" happen to Carly, and how was his own life altered by her fate? With precise, expert prose, award-winning writer David Long weaves a spellbinding and sensual novel that explores the workings of religious faith, the power of memory, and the redemption offered by opening oneself up to love.