Fiction. Clara Sverdlow has been stalked by Niko Kamenski, her high school lover, for almost twenty years. A recently sober alcoholic in her mid-thirties, she has found happiness in a tenuous marriage to Mark, another recovering alcoholic. Yet the past lurks over them like a great shadow. Clara's father, Viktor, was a Russian political prisoner in Auschwitz. The guilt and horror he still carries with him are part of his daughter's natural composition. Mark has his own demons--a brother dead from a drug overdose and connections to his hometown heavies, which he can't seem to break free of.

Author City: SOUTHAMPTON, NY USA

Kaylie Jones moved to Sagaponack, New York, in 1975, where her family continued to live for more than thirty years. She is the author of five novels, including A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES (Akashic Books, 2003) and the memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me (William Morrow & Company, 2009). She teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and in the Wilkes University low-residency MFA program in professional writing.