A middle-aged widow returns to the Turkish seaside town where she and her husband honeymooned twenty-eight years before, only to find the place gone to seed, haunted by sunburned Germans and mangy cats. At every turn, she is ambushed by evidence of other people's love, or lust, anyway. The owner of her rented villa has neglected to stow his sex swing or a naked photograph of his girlfriend; later, his estranged wife appears and too quickly divulges the secrets of their marriage. In a definitively bleak detail, even a spoon from the local ice-cream parlor tastes of "a century of tongues." Vida has made a specialty of lives in abeyance--this is her third novel in which a woman goes abroad in search of herself--and for much of the book her heroine simply drifts. It feels jarring, then, when, near the end, something happens and her character hurtles toward epiphany.

Yvonne, a Vermont schoolteacher whose husband was killed by a heedless driver, makes a pilgrimage back to the Turkish seaside town where they honeymooned. But her journey and her judgment are distorted by grief. She rents a house that comes with an intrusive cast of characters and cultivates a lad who isn't the waif she imagined. Quietly provocative, The Lovers explores the perils of self-involvement and the ease with which we destroy one another's lives.

In Vida's third novel, a middle-aged woman, grieving over the death of her husband, returns to the village in Turkey where they honeymooned. Yvonne, both dignified and terrifically vulnerable, makes for a moving companion throughout this dreamy story of reawakening. Vida has a cinematic flair for storytelling. Of the desiccated town to which Yvonne returns, she writes, "It had been looted by tide and tourists and the scalding sun that robbed boats of their color." The character wrestles with her many identities--widow, woman, teacher, mother--as she struggles to see herself with clarity. It's a novel that demands a movie version starring Meryl Streep. A−

Is it wise to return to the scene of your honeymoon after the sudden death of your spouse? That's what Yvonne, a seemingly sensible history teacher, decides to do in Vida's polished and unnerving third novel. Founding coeditor of the Believer, winner of the Kate Chopin Writing Award, and coauthor of the screenplay for Away We Go (2009), Vida has created a brilliant, topsy-turvy, twenty-first-century variation on E. M. Forster's Passage to India. Dodging her adult children, the mismatched twins glossy Matthew and rehab-veteran Aurelia, Yvonne, in deep shock, rents a fancy house on the coast of Turkey built by the landlord for his mistress. Yvonne is befriended by Ozlem, the landlord's aggressively inquisitive ex-wife, and becomes attached to Ahmet, a boy who collects and sells seashells. As she tries to adjust to widowhood while navigating perplexing social situations and painful memories, things go disastrously wrong. Vida creates an atmosphere at once molten and chilling as she deftly exposes the wounding reverberations of timeless conflicts between men and women, parents and children, East and West, appearance and truth.

An elegant consideration of how death and distance tightens human connections--a big theme that Vida addresses with sure-footedness and charm.