Deborah's pick is Mudwoman, by Joyce Carol Oates.
Synopsis:
Meredith Ruth (M.R.) Neukirchen is the first female president of an
ivy league university, clearly modeled after the author's own place of
work, Princeton. She is driving to upstate New York to deliver a speech
about the Iraq war, which she is opposed to in spite of the politics of
her school's opinionated donors. Understandably, she's stressed.
Not-so-understandably, this leads her to abandon the presentation to
visit the mud flats that overrun the town where she grew up.
Soon, the trauma of her childhood is revealed to us: Her wayward
mother attempted to drown her in those very flats; her mother's husband
sexually abused her; she was taken in mistakenly by another fanatically
religious couple. M.R. (aka Mudwoman) begins to lose herself in these
memories, and her psyche begins to deteriorate, as she and the reader
lose sight of what's real and what's not.
Deborah says: Complex story that modern women can relate to. Interesting dream-state fugues.
A thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak.