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"The photos Judith Stanley takes are just for her, photography a private passion that fills her suburban days until her husband Tom comes home for dinner. And yet, she senses that her pictures are good. In them, she poignantly captures hidden moments of unsettling truth: a teenage girl crying amidst the revelry of a Labor Day parade; a red-lipsticked woman with her head thrown back, laughing, ready to devour the men standing rapt around her; her own reflection in the window of a liquor store, ghost-like among the glittering bottles. But Judith is unprepared for her professor Paul's astonished praise: "Stunning," he calls the images. "Extraordinary." She has an uncanny eye, he says, and should consider publication. He could help. Emboldened by Paul's encouragement, if not convinced by his entreaty for her to share her work with strangers, Judith moves beyond the confines of her staid neighborhood, first to other small towns, then to the city. Tom worries already about her going around on her own, so Judith doesn't tell him about the man who's begun to follow her. She knows him, too, or thinks she does: she's certain it's the same man who attacked and maimed her when she was a teenager, a secret she's kept even from her own husband. Judith can't imagine how or why the man has returned all these years later to torment her, but she's sure of his presence: the sound of his breathing on the phone, his hand on her elbow on a crowded street, his dark silhouette lurking in the frame of every self-portrait she takes. She's "a selfish fucking bitch," the man hisses, uncaring about whose pain or shame she commits to film, so long as the image pleases her. And he's right, Judith thinks. She could put her camera down at any time. Perhaps that would appease the man and keep her safe. But she can't; she won't. That is, until one dark night when the man finally emerges from the shadows, and Judith's story suddenly and irrevocably becomes his own. Chilling, unexpected, and heart-poundingly propulsive, THE MAN is a masterful novel about the seduction of artistic freedom, the unease of suburban normalcy, and the inescapable fear of living as a woman constantly surveilled by men. Brilliantly conceived and elegantly constructed, Laura Sims's latest probes the very real dangers that lurk within the terrifying recesses of our own minds. For readers of Jean Hanff Korelitz, Patricia Highsmith, and Han Kang, THE MAN turns its own uncanny lens onto the relationships between men and women, photographers and subjects, pursuers and the pursued, and asks: through whose eyes do we see this world? And whose version of it do we believe?"-- Provided by publisher.
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