The world below - Sue Miller

Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroad in her San Francisco life. She is twice divorced - although she knows public opinion only seems to allow for one marital mistake - and her three children are grown and scattered. Then news comes that she has inherited her grandmother Georgia's home in Vermont. Putting her teaching job on hold, Catherine travels east to the house where she has frequently taken refuge, as a child from her mother's bouts of dementia and eventual suicide and later from the wreckage of her first marriage. Catherine finds in Vermont not only the ghosts of her own past but those of Georgia's as well. Diaries from the attic emerged of a young woman who had lost her own mother in her teens, who had been condemned to a sanitorium for tuberculosis, and there harboured a secret passion for a fellow patient. As Catherine increasingly comprehends the woman she has only ever known as a grandmother, she begins to feel as if she is living in two worlds, her own and Georgia's as a 'buried stream' below. With unforgettable characters so vivid you can almost see and touch them, THE WORLD BELOW is story telling at its most magical.