The stars are brighter and closer-seeming tonight, the moon a pale sliver in the western sky.  Looking up, I feel myself tumbling into the cold hush of the night:  a black space without purpose or limits.  Without fear I slip into emptiness, trusting my skin to keep me in light.

Set largely in the high desert of northern New Mexico and infused with the sensuousness of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings,The Way Back explores the moral dilemma of a woman who must come to terms with her damaged childhood before she can undo the pain she has caused to the people she loves.

Julia Fine is in Taos when the novel begins, attempting to retrieve her dream of being an artist—a dream she’d abandoned years before when she married and started a family.  A forty-one-year-old social worker, Julia is well aware of the hurt she has already inflicted on her husband and child by leaving them back home in the care of her sister-in-law Diana.  But the arid landscape has claimed her, its stark beauty a manifestation of her own troubled soul.

© 2011 Lisa Lieberman