Sue Miller, The Lake Shore Limited

Start: 04/06/2010 7:00 pm

The story centers on "The Lake Shore Limited"—a play Billy has written about an imagined terrorist bombing of that train as it pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and about a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife, who is traveling on it. Billy had waited in just such a way on 9/11 to hear whether her lover, Gus, was on one of the planes used in the attack.

How Billy has come to create the play out of these emotions, how it is then created anew on the stage, how the performance itself touches and changes the other characters’ lives—these form the thread that binds them all together and drives the novel compulsively forward.

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels The Senator's Wife, Lost in the Forest, The World Below, W h ile I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and T he Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbotts; and the memoir The Story of My Father.