bug

Some memories refuse to stay lost.

In a small Montana town, thirty-eight-year-old writer Sara Mitchell has been alone for nine years. Her work is solitary. Her cat is gone. Her evenings are quiet. She has stopped expecting much from her life.

Then she starts dreaming of a little girl.

The girl wears a yellow sweater and a green clip in her hair. She is always eight years old. She sits with Sara on a porch that does not exist, beside a lake Sara has never seen. The girl tells Sara things - small, impossible things - that turn out to be true. Mack misses you, she says, naming Sara's cat. Claire hates red wine.

The girl calls herself Bug.

Two thousand miles away, in Boston, an architect named Zach Holm is finishing eighteen months of grief. His relationship has ended. The woman he loved told him he could not let something go. He doesn't know how to explain what he was holding on to - but seven years ago, on a train platform, he saw a child in a yellow sweater. He has thought of her every day since.

He has been drawing a house for her without knowing it. A porch with a missing spindle. A kitchen looking out at a lake.

When Sara and Zach finally meet, they realize they have both been in the company of the same child - a child who is not theirs yet, but who is doing everything she can to make sure she will be.

bug is a quiet, luminous novel about the strange threads that bind us across time, about the kinds of knowing that arrive before language, and about what happens when we listen - even when what we hear cannot quite be explained.

For readers of The History of Love, The Time Traveler's Wife, and Plainsong.