The City Of Invention

Sue Miller is such a master of the domestic that it felt as though I was living someone's life rather than reading about it. She reminds me of Anne Tyler in that her books seem populated by nice middle class people for whom life has somehow turned sour; but this is a darker, more modern and more sexually explicit world than Anne Tyler's and there's a forensic quality about the prose as she unpeels the layers of betrayal and abuse surrounding her characters. Highly readable but also tense and claustrophobic, this is a study of what we understand, or
fail to understand, when we talk about happiness.