In the StoryThe Children of the Lake
There are four of them in the photograph. They all remember a fifth. Sorting through old summer-camp slides, Maud Lenoir rediscovers the summer of 1996: the windbreakers, the games, the lake. And an absence that makes no sense. She is not the only one who remembers this child. Other adults carry the same missing piece, with details they thought belonged only to them.
Open the novel ↗A moment in the opening pages
Maud Lenoir had laid the box flat on the sorting table beneath the fluorescent lights of the temporary storeroom. She was removing the sleeves one by one with the care she reserved for fragile objects and sensitive colleagues. Through the yellowed polyester, slides from the summer of 1996 resembled tiny, badly washed windows: children in windbreakers, a white bus, a pine-paneled dining room, then the lake, pale gray, motionless even in the grass along its edge.Read the excerpt ↗