The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman

• Belfast Education and Library Board, Northern Ireland

Many years ago, Iris Greenfeder's mother disappeared. They were living at Hotel Equinox where Iris's father was the manager and where her mother wrote delicate, powerful fantasies. Then, one day, she took a train and never returned. She was found dead in a hotel fire in Brooklyn, registered as another man's wife.
Returning to Hotel Equinox, now an academic struggling to finish her doctorate, Iris needs to find the truth about her mother; some keys are held in those fantastical writings and others in the memories of those who knew her. Kay Greenfeder, it seems, was a woman without a past. But as Iris begins to untangle the secrets of years before, she realises that the past was very different to what she had believed, and much more dangerous...

Carol Goodman is the author of one previous novel, The Lake of Dead Languages . Her writing has been published in a number of literary magazines. After graduating from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin, she taught Latin for several years. She then studied for an MFA in fiction. She currently teaches writing and lives in Long Island, USA.