Reading Between the Lines

By Hossam Mardini

A daughter's revenge. A mother's secret. A professor who can't explain what he did.

When Mira Lawson finds a photograph hidden in her dead mother's journal-a photograph of a man she's never met-she uncovers a love story her mother never told her about. The man is Daniel Reed, a literature professor in New England. Fifteen years ago, he loved Mira's mother, Julia. Then he left her. Julia spent the rest of her life writing letters she never sent.

Now Mira is going to find him.

Under a false name, she infiltrates Daniel's creative writing seminar. She sits in his classroom. She reads his books. She walks across his bridge. She plans to make him understand what he did to her mother.

But the man she finds is not the monster she expected.

Daniel is fragile, guilty, and unable to explain why he left. His marriage is empty. His writing has stalled. His wife, Catherine, has stopped painting and doesn't know how to start again. As Mira grows closer to Daniel, her plan for revenge begins to unravel-and she must decide whether to destroy him or to let him go.

Set against the cold light of a New England autumn, Reading Between the Lines is a literary novel about grief as inheritance, the danger of reading other people's lives, and the cost of choosing safety over truth. It is the story of three women-Julia, Mira, and Catherine-whose lives rhyme with one another without collapsing into sameness. And it is the story of a man who made a choice he still cannot fully explain, and who must live in the silence of that inexplicability.

For readers of Rachel Cusk, Anne Enright, and Meg Wolitzer, this is a novel about the things we carry, the letters we never send, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

"Daniels is a writer who trusts silence. The burnt pizza scene alone is worth the price of admission."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HCLB3G82
• ISBN13: 9798190166095
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"