Hysteria : A Novel EPUB

One of The Globe and Mails Favourite Books of the Year

The closer she gets to the truth, the faster it slips away.

In the spring of 1945, fifteen year-old Heike circles in the mountains high above Switzerland. Pushed out the door by a worried mother, Heike and her little sister, Lena, have escaped Dresden only days ahead of the firebombs that will destroy that city, to cross a war-torn Germany on their own. But now, Lena is lost and Heike is alone, stalked by a feral dog.

Eleven years later, Heikes life looks very different: married to a prominent American psychiatrist, shes living in idyllic upstate New York, where shes free to wander the woods and care for her beloved four-year old son, Daniel. But despite the shiny veneer of this new life, Heike cannot shake the feeling that something is terribly wrong. On the sunniest day of the year, shes relaxing by a pond with Daniel when a strange little girl appears out of nowherethen eerily disappears below the surface of the water. From that moment on, nothing is ever the same again. Is the girl a ghost, or an omen of bad things to come? The closer Heike gets to the truth, the faster it slips away.