A remote lake in Patagonia draws a scientific expedition in 1922 to search for the fabled monster living in its depths. They find nothing. In 1975, Ana Mullin, the daughter of one member of the expedition, takes up the search for the monster. Ana has lived by the lake all her life, the latter part in the company of Lanz and Ilse, two elderly Hungarian, refugees from Nazism. Lanz lives in the past, mixing memories of past atrocities of war-torn Europe with his perception of the present, blending his vision of the emerging years of brutality with glimpses of the monster. The lake, meanwhile, harbors secrets of human brutality in which Ana and her companions rapidly become embroiled, leading Ana both towards the capital, and back to the past of her father. Dark, mysterious, secretive, violent, and melancholic, the narrative glides beneath the surface of the lake, surging in moments of revelation, and sinking back to obscurity. Concerning questions of human cruelty and compassion, solitude and love, identity and memory, The Lake follows Ana’s quest to find the monster within herself as much as it leads the reader on a compelling quest towards the monstrous within us all.
