bug

Some memories refuse to stay lost.

In a small Montana town, thirty-eight-year-old writer Sara Mitchell has been alone for nine years. Her work is solitary, her cat is gone, and her evenings are quiet. She has stopped expecting much from her life.

Then she starts dreaming of a little girl.

The girl wears a yellow sweater and a green clip in her hair. She is always eight years old. She sits with Sara on a porch that does not exist, beside a lake Sara has never seen. The girl tells Sara things - small, impossible things - that turn out to be true. Mack misses you, she says, naming Sara's cat. Claire hates red wine. The girl calls herself Bug.

Two thousand miles away, in Boston, an architect named Zach Holm is finishing eighteen months of grief. His relationship has ended. The woman he loved told him he could not let something go. He doesn't know how to explain what he was holding on to - but seven years ago, on a train platform, he saw a child in a yellow sweater. He has thought of her every day since.

When a small twist of professional good fortune brings Zach to Montana, he walks into an antique shop in Livingston and meets the woman behind the counter's friend - a writer who, it turns out, has been dreaming his daughter for two months.

She isn't his daughter yet.

But she is doing everything she can to make sure she will be.

Across letters from a dead woman who knew Bug too, across plans for a house Zach has been drawing without understanding why, across dreams that arrive in late-afternoon light, Sara and Zach come to recognize that they have both been moved toward each other for longer than they have known each other. The child who is engineering it all is running out of time. She has been visible for years. She is about to become a body.

bug is a quiet, luminous novel about the threads that bind people across time - the kinds of knowing that arrive before language, the patient work of being found, and what happens when we say yes to something we cannot quite explain.

A novel for readers of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, and Kent Haruf's Plainsong. Set in the small-town Montana landscape of Livingston, Park County, and the Absaroka Range, bug is the ninth novel from Michael Jonathan Hyde.