The Life Before Her Eyes

Book excerpt: A “hauntingly original” psychological thriller about innocence, memory, and the effect of a moment of violence (O: The Oprah Magazine). In the girls’ bathroom, Diana and her best friend, Maureen, are stealing a moment from the routine drudgery of high school when a classmate enters holding a gun. Suddenly, Diana sees her life—past, present, and acutely imagined future—dance before her eyes. Through prose infused with the dramatically feminine sensuality of spring, readers will experience sixteen-year-old Diana’s uncertain steps into womanhood—her awkward, heated forays into sex; her fresh, fragile construction of an identity—and, in exhilarating detail, her life-not-lived as a doting mother and wife of forty. Together with the sights and sounds of renewal are the tasks of Diana’s adulthood: protecting her beloved daughter and holding on to her successful husband. This “poetic” novel encompasses both the truth of a teenager’s world and the transformations of midlife (Vanity Fair). Resonant and deeply stirring, The Life Before Her Eyes finds piercing beauty in the midst of a nightmare that echoes like a dirge beneath each new spring, in a story that “takes on deep matters of life and death; conscience and consciousness; family, love and friendship” (Los Angeles Times). “Evokes terror and redemption, shadows and light. Kasischke treads a delicate line with the precision and confidence of a tightrope walker. She reminds us to look hard at life, to notice its beauty and cruelty, even as it flashes before us and disappears.” —The New York Times “Mesmerizing.” —Chicago Tribune