Two Harbors [Paperback]

Those who live in the isolated port town of Two Harbors, Minnesota, still remember the strange downfall of Lila Maywood-a striking beauty who abandoned her family for Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star. Lila's disappearance has defined the life of her daughter, Casey, left with only an autographed, heart-shaped headshot of her mother. When a big-city stranger shows up in town, Casey reluctantly falls for him, only to have him desert her, too. This new abandonment brings Casey face-to-face with the legacy of her mother's past, and the possibility that her own future could follow the same course. Against her father's counsel, Casey journeys from Two Harbors to Hollywood, where she discovers a world of secret lives and shifting roles that holds revealing truths about those who left her behind.

Cinematic and suspenseful, this is the electrifying story of a daughter learning the one act her mother never mastered: letting go.

PRAISE FOR TWO HARBORS

This is the deepest, purest first novel of the year. --Edmund White

Kate Benson's risky, compelling, and bold missing person story deserves the widest of audiences. --Stephen Schwandt, author ofSiren Song

A mother takes her daughter's hand and leads her underwater.

Blue. Cold, and shimmering through the dark. In reality, just the high school gym-but with the lights dimmed to a wintry sparkle, poster-board seaweed reaching up the walls, it's easy to pretend you've fallen into something magical. Today is the end of Winter Frolic, the annual Two Harbors fair. The theme this year, Beneath the Ice, has sunk the town past the solid surface of Lake Superior to an arctic, exotic underworld, and the daughter looks around with a ten-year-old's appreciative awe: silver balloons in bubbly bursts, wispy blue streamers across the windows. The icy facade of those watery lights. Hand-cut paper snowflakes defy the laws of physics and shed their twinkling glil-