Suspicious River - Tapa blanda

Leila Murray is young, married and works in a small town motel as a receptionist, then as a prostitute. As she slowly discloses the details of her childhood, contemporary events unfold and lead her to the dark turn her life will take one October weekend when she meets Gary Jensen. Gradually it becomes clear that the seemingly random abuses of her adult life parallel those Leila witnessed and suffered as a child. She is reliving them, uncertain whether she will survive or, indeed, if she wants to. With a poet's sense of timing and precision Laura Kasischke has written a novel of beauty and poignancy, a novel more timely than ever about sexual violence and our culture's fascination with it.

A first novel about sexual violence. A young small-town motel receptionist trapped in a loveless marriage drifts into prostitution. Interspersed with increasingly menacing episodes are scenes from her childhood - her mother's murder and the numb promiscuity of her adolescence.