Some Other Town

Channeling the emotional intensity of Susan Minot and Amy Bloom-and infused with a witty, dream-like surrealism that calls to mind the fiction of Margaret Atwood-this mesmerizing debut takes us inside the enthrallingly unsettling world of Margaret Lydia Benning, which turns upside down when she falls in love...and then unravels before our eyes. "What I have to tell Ben is just this. At last I am certain. All the signs, all the dreams are in. And I know now I have made a terrible mistake. I was wrong, it turns out, about us." It is May 1973, and Margaret Lydia Benning still lives in the same Midwest town where she went to college. By day, she works for the Project, a university-sponsored publisher of wayward basal readers housed in a former sanatorium. She shares the sanatorium's fourth floor with a squadron of eccentric, ill-suited editors and its resident ghost, Emmaline. At night, Margaret abandons the sanatorium's strange but familiar confines for her small house on Mott Street, in which she lives alone, and the disturbing overtures of her mentally unstable neighbor Mrs. Eberline. Emotionally sleepwalking through the days is no way to lead a life. But then Margaret meets Ben Adams, a visiting professor and teacher of the applied art of seeing. Despite the odds-and their best intentions-Margaret and her professor become an item, and she glimpses a heretofore unimaginable future. For the first time, she has hope...until Ben inexplicably vanishes. In the vacuum of his disapperance, Mrs. Eberline's ramblings take on a darker tone and Margaret is forced to pull apart the ill-fitting fragments of her world until she discovers the truth that will set her free. Told through intertwined perspectives, Some Other Town is a novel of many hues. Anchored by its achingly human (and mordantly witty) narrator, Margaret's story of stagnation transforms into one of emotional revelation when Ben comes into her life-only to become shadowed by darkness as she struggles to figure out how it all fell apart, even though the answer will ultimately lead her to the dawn of a new beginning. By turns incandescent and haunting, Beth Collison's lyrical prose tells an unforgettable tale, with a heart-breaking twist, of one woman's awakening to her own possibility-and her ability to love, and love well.