Michelle Richmond dazzled readers and critics alike with her luminous novel The Year of Fog. Now Richmond returns with an intensely emotional, multilayered family dramaa womans search for her sisters killer that spirals into a journey of secrets, revelations, and damaged lives. All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lilas sister. Until one day, without warning, the shape of their family changed forever. Twenty years ago, Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered in a crime that was never solved. In the aftermath of her sisters death, Ellie entrusted her most intimate feelings to a man who turned the story into a bestselling true crime booka book that both devastated her family and identified one of Lilas professors as the killer.Decades later, two Americans meet in a remote village in Nicaragua. Ellie is now a professional coffee buyer, an inveterate traveler and incapable of trust. Peter is a ruined academic. And their meeting is not by chance. As rain beats down on the steaming rooftops of the village, Peter leaves Ellie with a giftthe notebook that Lila carried everywhere, a piece of evidence not found with her body. Stunned, Ellie will return home to San Francisco to explore the mysteries of Lilas notebook, filled with mathematical equations, and begin a search that has been waiting for her all these years. It will lead her to a hundred-year-old mathematical puzzle, to a lover no one knew Lila had, to the motives and fate of the man who profited from their familys anguishand to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. As she connects with people whose lives unknowingly swirled around her own, Ellie will confront a series of startling revelationsfrom the eloquent truths of numbers to confessions of love, pain and loss.A novel about the stories and lies that strangers, lovers and families telland the secrets we keep even from ourselvesMichelle Richmonds new novel is a work of astonishing depth and beauty, at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.From the Hardcover edition.
