Bitter Lake - Tapa dura

In this novel set in a mill town with the tangled greenery of Pennsylvania's wooded hills as backdrop, Judith Hutchins and her daughters struggle with the latest disappearance of Gortfisherman, astronomer, and sometime husband and father. Headstrong and severe, fourteen-year-old Lil cannot accept her father's absence or her mother's reaction to it. Judith, devoting herself to a new job to keep the family going, finds herself involved with a lover, while Lil takes matters into her own hands, determined to find her father and bring him to account. Told in the alternating voices of Judith and Lil, the novel is a story of the resilience of love, of forgiveness in families, of the roundabout ways in which people connect."

ANN HARLEMAN'S collection, "Happiness," won the 1993 University of Iowa Short Fiction Award. She has been a Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellow and received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award in 1991. She is a Research Associate in the American Civilization Department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she makes her home.