Lioness

<p><b>Emotionally wrenching. . . . Haunting (and haunted) in the best possible way. --<i>Kirkus Reviews </i>(starred review) <br> Darkly compelling. --Tom Perrotta</b></p><p>In the fall of 2018 a bomb goes off at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia an incident the FBI declares an act of ecoterrorism. Arrested at the scene is Chris Bright a mountain hermit with a long history of activism. Unaccounted for--and presumed dead--is Mara Wood an installation artist who in the last two years has lost her son and left her husband.</p><p>But Mara's estranged husband David cannot quite believe she is dead and as he goes about reconstructing the story of what happened he begins to imagine an alternate narrative--one in which their son doesn't die and his wife doesn't leave him one in which his wife doesn't carry on a secret relationship with Chris Bright a man bent on fighting back against the environmental despoliation of his Appalachian home. <i>Lioness</i> is a page-turning heart-wrenching examination of extremism: What pushes people to act violently and is that violence ever justified?</p>