While I Was Gone: A Novel Paperback by Sue Miller

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While I Was Gone: A Novel Paperback by Sue Miller

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Product Details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; First Thus 9th Printing edition (May 12 2000)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345443284
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 9780345443281
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 227 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.95 x 1.65 x 20.4 cm

“Riveting . . . While I Was Gone [celebrates] what is impulsive in human nature.”
–The New York Times

“Miller weaves her themes of secrecy, betrayal, and forgiveness into a narrative that shines.”
–Time


Jo Becker has every reason to be content. She has three dynamic daughters, a loving marriage, and a rewarding career. But she feels a sense of unease. Then an old housemate reappears, sending Jo back to a distant past when she lived in a communal house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Drawn deeper into her memories of that fateful summer in 1968, Jo begins to obsess about the person she once was. As she is pulled farther from her present life, her husband, and her world, Jo struggles against becoming enveloped by her past and its dark secret.


“[While I Was Gone] swoops gracefully between the past and the present, between a woman’s complex feelings about her husband and her equally complex fantasies–and fears–about another man. . . . [Miller writes] well about the trials of faith.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“Quietly gripping . . . Jo shines steadily as the flawed and thoroughly modern heroine. As in her 1986 novel, The Good Mother, Miller shows how impulses can fracture the family.”
–USA Today

“Marvelous . . . poignant . . . powerful.”
–Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer


About Author

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels The World Below, Lost in the Forest, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbotts; and the memoir The Story of My Father. She lives in Boston.

Author Residence: Boston


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