In the Lake of the Woods

In the Lake of the Woods is a novel by the American writer Tim O'Brien, published in 1994.

John Wade is a Vietnam veteran and a politician who has just been beaten in a campaign for the Senate, and the book opens with him and his wife Kathy staying at a cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota while they recover. She disappears, and what follows is an attempt to work out whether she drowned, left or was killed, made by a narrator who assembles the evidence in front of the reader: testimony from the people involved, extracts from a book about the case, and long passages of John's own history. Those histories include his childhood with a father who drank and the tour in Vietnam that made him, which is where the novel's real subject lies, since the question it keeps circling is whether the man who lost the election is the man he has been pretending to be.

O'Brien served in Vietnam and has written several books drawn from the experience, and this novel was adapted for television in 1996.