Laura Kasischke dives back into novels with this thrilling small town mystery, THE LIFEGUARD This is a novel about grief and ambition, innocence and blame—a tale that spools out of and around a Midwestern swimming pool one summer afternoon, 1969, and into the future of an America yet to be imagined. In the town of Mission Hills, Michigan, an elementary school child drowns in the Olympic-sized pool at a summer swim club. By most, but not all, the lifeguard on duty that afternoon—a teenage girl who becomes the town's scapegoat, bearing the weight of their grief and fears—is seen as responsible for the tragedy. Kasischke weaves together overlapping narratives and shifting perspectives, gradually peeling back the layers of what really happened that day. Through poetic, sensory-rich prose, she explores the liminal spaces between memory and reality, innocence and culpability, childhood and adulthood. The story probes the arbitrary, inexorable nature of fate—how a single moment can alter lives forever, and how the search for answers can reveal unsettling truths about ourselves and those around us.
Author
Laura Kasischke is an American fiction writer and American poet with poetry awards and multiple well reviewed works of fiction. Her work has received the Juniper Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Prize, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes. Her novel The Life Before Her Eyes is the basis for the film of the same name, directed by Vadim Perelman, and starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood. Kasischke's work is particularly well-received in France, where she is widely read in translation. Her novel A moi pour toujours (Be Mine) was published by Christian Bourgois, and was a national best seller. Kasischke attended the University of Michigan and Columbia University. She is also currently a Professor of English Language and of the Residential College at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son.
