Antonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of
contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes
hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in
Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK
(Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward love and lost memory, of
public and private lives twisting out of control, Bound is Nelson's most accomplished and emotionally riveting work.
Catherine
and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are
negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed
secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just
fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and
content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's
long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian
of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver
manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past,
local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has
reappeared after years of quiet.
In a time of hauntings and new
revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private
obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence
of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may
only be determined by those who love them most.
