What Was Lost

May 2, 1994
While noble in ambition and geographically broad in scope, Miller's attempt to unite the spiritual destinies of three disparate characters across a variety of international settings is marred by a less than fluid narrative and confusingly similar character voices. The players include Lang Tzu, the son of a Chinese landowner, who collaborates with the Japanese when they invade the mainland; August Spiess, the family doctor who delivered him; Speiss's artist daughter Gertrude; and Steven Muir, an Australian whose narrative overview is intended to integrate the various parts and pieces of the nomadic plot. Most of the story takes place in mainland China in the 1930s and concerns the decision of several characters to emigrate to Australia following the tumultuous collapse of the feudal mandarin system. Miller's third novel (winner of last year's Miles Franklin Award for Fiction in Australia) will reward those patient readers with a bent for the more obscure spiritual fiction by such writers as Hesse, Goethe and Mann with many eloquent passages about the links between art, identity and sense of place.

Starred review from March 17, 2008
Stirring and beautifully crafted, this debut novel recounts how the repercussions of a girl’s disappearance can last for decades. In 1984, Kate Meaney is a 10-year-old loner who solves imaginary mysteries and guesses the dark secrets of the shoppers she observes at the Green Oaks mall. Kate’s unlikely circle includes her always-present stuffed monkey; 22-year-old Adrian, who works at the candy shop next door; and Kate’s classmate, Teresa Stanton, who hides her intelligence behind disruptive behavior. Kate’s grandmother has plans for Kate: send her to boarding school. But Kate doesn’t want to go. Fast forward to 2003, where it’s revealed through Lisa, Adrian’s sister, that Kate disappeared nearly 20 years ago, and Adrian, blamed in her disappearance, also vanished. Lisa works at a record store in Green Oaks and is drawn to Kurt, a security guard whose surveillance-camera sightings of a little girl clutching a stuffed monkey hint that he might have ties to Kate’s disappearance. Teresa, meanwhile, now a detective, has her own reasons for being haunted by Kate’s disappearance. Gripping to the end, the book is both a chilling mystery and a poignant examination of the effects of loss and loneliness.