Mia: A Novel

Summary

A Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, People, New England Review, and Crime Reads Best of the Summer

“An evocative, suspenseful heir to Patricia Highsmith’s best work.” —Teddy Wayne, author of The Winner

A stylish, unsettling work of psychological suspense about an American woman adrift in Mexico for a year, whose chance encounter with a glamorous older expat spirals into obsession and betrayal.

When Sally meets Louise outside her children’s school in San Miguel de Allende, she’s eager to befriend another American expat—especially one as cultured and knowing as Louise, with her ramshackle house full of art and her stories about her brushes with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. In Mexico for just a year with her architect husband, Sally is entranced by elegant, sharp-edged Louise, and the two quickly become inseparable. Soon enough, Louise has begun calling her Mia and, at first playfully, then in earnest, introducing Sally as her daughter to a growing circle of friends.

By turns enthralled with the possibility of a new identity in Mexico and troubled by Louise’s magnetic hold over her, Sally attempts to keep the relationship a secret from her husband. As the specter of Sally’s troubled childhood looms, and Louise’s self-mythologizing tightens its grip, the two women test the limits of reinvention—until their fictions threaten the security of Sally’s flesh-and-blood family.

A taut, beguiling work of psychological suspense, Mia is a mother-daughter story turned on its head and a high-intensity fable about the limitations of playing a role that is not your own.