Susan Coll

Book Review
The Washington Post
‘Le Divorce’ was a ’90s sensation. Diane Johnson is back again with another hit.

The opening scene is perfection. We meet the eponymous heroine of Diane Johnson’s latest novel, “Lorna Mott Comes Home,” as she rides in the back of a taxi, en route to the train station in Lyon. Lorna, an American woman “of a certain age,” asks the driver to stop so she can observe the aftermath of a mudslide that has unearthed coffins, bursting them open and exposing corpses, bones and “a huge, sticky hillock of treacherous clay” in the village of Pont-les-Puits, where she has lived with her French husband for 20 years.

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