A Beautiful Land

Miller's A Beautiful Land is rich in detail, often mythical in nature, timeless in relevance, and beautifully, thoughtfully, written. I feel as if I've been on a journey. She takes us into worlds we cannot see and reveals them. As with Indigo Rose, her ability to convey the human condition through character and events is as compelling as it is meaningful. I was drawn deeply into the story.

—James Meyer, author of These Fair Days

Every genocide is unique, and yet the suffering and endurance of the survivors of each such outbreak of madness transcends both time and place. In A Beautiful Land, Susan Miller has rendered with exquisite compassion the struggles of those who have been exiled from their homes by the unspeakable violence of their former neighbors. Detail by detail, she follows their journeys as they attempt to carry on, to continue breathing, to continue loving, to comprehend what they have been through, to find a new home and perhaps even return to the old one. These characters and their stories are unforgettable.

—Eileen Pollack, author of The Professor of Immortality and Breaking and Entering

Susan Miller's novel, A Beautiful Land, explores the lethal tension between rival ethnic groups and the resulting destroyed lives. With vivid prose and page-turning suspense, she follows the paths of Raissa and her son as they struggle to survive a deranged world in a mysterious forest and create a new family. Miller's archetypal fable examines life after the worst has happened as the etched characters reinvent families, heal their humanity, and resurrect community.

—Ann Pearlman, author of the Pulitzer nominated Infidelity and The Christmas Cookie Clubseries

Susan Miller's A Beautiful Land quickly bonded me with its truthful characters. I became enthralled by the sheer humanness of the heroine, Raissa. Susan Miller expresses a deep solidarity for the hardships her characters suffer, and Raissa shines throughout with an inner resiliency giving hope through whatever hardships life hands us.

—Doug Wheeler, host of the podcast From the Belly

In A Beautiful Land, people—and readers—find moments of meaning, adventure, connection, and love, even while extreme fear and loss grip at them. Readers will feel for characters who struggle with life paths that are formed from choices they made during urgent moments of their pasts.

Susan Miller writes a story showing how life can be horrible and ordinary at the same time. Family connections ground the characters and give readers hope and warmth. Nature plays a role in this story, and readers will find themselves alive in this fictitious land of forest, farmland, wetlands, and animals.

I didn’t want to put this book down—I needed to know how the characters got through the challenges thrown at them. I highly recommend this book.

-Amazon Verified Purchase Review, 5 stars

This is a beautiful and moving book. In simple and lyrical language, Miller brings us into the lives of three sisters and a brother who are uprooted by an explosion of ethnic hatred and forced to flee their home. Their journey is terrifying and their story gripping, as one of the sisters goes deep into the forest, learning to survive in primitive conditions, and the others search to find shelter and safety beyond their native land. Each is marked by the experience in his or her own particular way, and much of the book explores how they react in the years following their exile, how their lives are changed, and how they attempt to find a place in the aftermath of the upheaval. The story has some unexpected twists, with one of the siblings making a surprising decision to return to a place of danger and to regain family through an inexplicable act, while others find ways of surviving and making new lives for themselves in unfamiliar and, later, familiar, places. Throughout the story, the characters wrestle with their past, sometimes finding emotional healing in their work, in education, and in the love not only of humans beings but beloved animals as well. This book offers an unusual take on human darkness and the wake it leaves behind.

-Amazon Verified Purchase Review, 5 stars

Miller has written an amazing book telling an often painful, always moving, story about conflict between groups of people that echoes so much of what is going on in our world today. Her language is rich, elegant, powerful. She paints pictures and makes music with her words as she relates a fictional, but all too real, saga of what happens to families when they are driven from their homes and separated from those they love. The characters are vividly drawn and engaging. What happens to them is often painful and disturbing to imagine, but it always feels important to try to understand and experience with them all the trauma and, incredibly, all the love and joy they live through in this powerful story. Quite a book!

-Amazon Verified Purchase Review, 5 stars

A Beautiful World by Susan Beth Miller is magnificent. It is so appealing in so many ways. First, Miller is a marvelous story teller. The main characters—members of one family subjected to genocide—are so finely and precisely sculpted that you can’t help yourself from being drawn into their lives, both the horrors they face and their ways of coping with them. You will be hooked and not able to put it down. The plot weaves the impact of a genocide on both the victims and their killers told in terrifying but necessary detail. It is clear that Miller, herself a clinical psychologist, understands and can communicate clearly how traumatic events can break the body and spirit while at the same time provide opportunities for restitution. While Miller reminds us that this is a work of fiction, inevitably it can evoke comparisons with the slaughter in Rwanda and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, allowing us to better appreciate the permanent damage that endures. Secondly, Miller forces us to grapple with some of the big questions of our times—whether families are identified by blood lines or psychological kinship, how much is the evil unleashed by genocide a product of group pressure or individual responsibility, how can nature, in its provision of solace and sustenance in the physical substance of a beautiful land be an agent of healing and harmony. Miller doesn’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but she deserves our gratitude for posing them to us. Finally, Miller is nothing less than a spectacular writer. Her prose is so often poetic and lyrical, some passages stopped me in my tracks, compelling me to read it a time or two more, in order to savor its beauty. She clearly has a talent for propelling the narrative at a breathtaking pace, while enchanting the reader with the sometimes magical scenery along the way. This a book that thrills, touches and teaches but will never be forgotten.

-Amazon Verified Purchase Review, 5 stars