The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

"Unusual and engaging . . . A subjective, Whitmanesque meditation on the way we live today . . . What makes this book compelling is not so much where the author goes, but how she reflects on what she sees when she gets there . . . Her wonderfully trenchant observations cast new light on the everyday." —Witold Rybczynski, The Wall Street Journal


Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with
a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of
observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of
W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular
talent to combine this profound book-length mosaic—a blend of historical travelogue,
reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique
genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our
surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of
cultural reinvention.