Lacy Eye

A haunting, evocative novel about a woman who might have to face the disturbing truth about her own daughter.

Hanna and Joe send their awkward daughter Dawn off to college hoping that she will finally "come into her own." When she brings her new boyfriend, Rud, to her sister's wedding, her parents try to suppress their troubling impressions of him for Dawn's sake. Not long after, Hanna and Joe suffer a savage attack at home, resulting in Joe's death and Hanna's severe injury and memory loss.

Rud is convicted of the crime, and the community speculates that Dawn may also have been involved. When Rud wins an appeal and Dawn returns to live in the family home, Hanna resolves to recall that traumatic night so she can testify in the retrial, exonerate her daughter, and keep her husband's murderer in jail.

But as those memories resurface, Hanna faces the question of whether she knows her own daughter-and whether she ever did.

A professor of creative writing at Emerson College in Boston, Jessica Treadway's story collection Please Come Back to Me received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published by University of Georgia Press in 2010. Her other books are the novel And Give You Peace, which was published by Graywolf Press in 2001 and named to Booklist's Top 10 Debut Novels of 2001, and the collection Absent Without Leave (Delphinium Books/Simon & Schuster), which received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares in 1993. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Five Points, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Shenandoah, and Bellevue Literary Review, among others. Treadway has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of PEN New England, where she served as co-chair of the Freedom to Write Committee. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.