I loved it right away. My editor showed it to me in a dark bar—Barbès on 9th Street in Park Slope—and I fell in love with it. I don’t recall seeing a series of attempts, just two alternatives in the bar, and this was my clear choice. I like the fact that it’s both concrete, divided into sky and sea, and abstract.

Though I did not love Lydia Millet's Ghost Lights as a complete novel (How the Dead Dream set the bar oh so high...), it is littered with passages so achingly beautiful and insights about human nature so scarily spot-on, that I enjoyed it moment to moment for the sentences in a way I did not enjoy it for the plot.

Millet is operating at a high level in “Ghost Lights,” and the book provides a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self’s rhythms and certainties are shaken. We should be grateful that such an interesting writer has turned her attention to this rich, terrifying subject.

Although Millet is at her best when venturing outside the lines of strictly realist fiction (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and Love in Infant Monkeys come to mind), this meandering three-part tale (the second in a proposed trilogy with the third book due in 2012) of a group of people trying like hell to break out of their various life traps is engrossing as it is cautionary. Millet reveals what Hal, T., and the rest of us all know deep down, that we're each of us responsible for the choices we make.

The most important thing a reviewer can tell a reader about a book like this is that it’s worth the effort, so rest assured, dear reader: It is.

Five Norton Books listed as NYT Notables: Lydia Millet, Joshua Cody, Stephen Greenblatt, Andrew Graham-Dixon, and Maggie Nelson.

In not endeavoring to make Hal a more likable person than is necessary and plausible, Millet does what kindred authorial spirits Muriel Spark and Tom Drury did in books like “Aiding and Abetting’’ and “Black Brook’’: By being honest about her flawed protagonist, she forces the reader to accept the flaws as part of understanding what makes a complicated person worth understanding in the first place. That is, by making us see the flaws, Millet makes us see how flawed people compel our understanding and love.

The novel seems puny and shuttered as it follows Hal, who is "bound up in the saga, his own concerns." Readers may not find themselves quite so rapt.

Millet is that rare writer of ideas who can turn a ruminative passage into something deeply personal. She can also be wickedly funny, most often at the expense of the unexamined life.

Literature is hands down the sharpest tool in the shed for conveying this feeling of being lost in one's own skin, one's own life. Nervous breakdown, midlife crisis, amnesia: literature allows us to regard characters in the midst of these conditions from the inside and the outside. What was once familiar is now inaccessible, bizarre, even terrifying. Lydia Millet has prowled these corridors in all eight of her remarkable books, seven novels and a short story collection. Not only does she describe disorientation fully, she locates it squarely in modern American life as captured by David Byrne's lyric: "This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife."

As was the case in How the Dead Dream, the book is largely built as a catapult propelling its protagonist and the reader into new territory, but where How the Dead Dream got lost with T. in the wilderness, Ghost Lights finds more to explore in Hal’s mildness. A much more contemplative novel—where T. is led by action and bravado, Hal prefers to ruminate and be led—Ghost Lights puts together a clearer vision of the previous book’s themes of the way identity is tied up with social purpose.

One of Millet's most compelling obsessions is the problem of privacy: the terrible and wonderful loneliness of the individual, the luxurious solitude of the mind. To enter Hal Lindley's head in the final pages of this novel feels both a privileged and necessary invasion. Millet shows with documentary precision how we lumber comically toward comprehension, wearily, and almost wholly against our will.

Typically my writing prompt is nothing fancy—just your basic same old, same old. Fear of death.

Portland, Maine Bookseller Josh Christie on GHOST LIGHTS: "It's a suburban comic novel that segues into Heart of Darkness. And a champagne dry sense of humor."

In this darkly funny comedy of manners, Hal Linley, an IRS bureaucrat in a crumbling marriage volunteers to fly to Belize to search for his wife's recently-vanished employer, T (the protagonist from Millet's novel How the Dead Dream), who disappeared deep in the tropical jungle.

The novel follows an IRS employee who travels to the jungle in search of T., a character from Ms. Millet’s critically acclaimed How the Dead Dream. What follows is like a satirical Heart of Darkness, overflowing with wit and pitch-perfect writing.

Lydia Millet's "Ghost Lights" is a sequel to her 2008 novel "How the Dead Dream."

At 7,500 words strong and encompassing 66 titles, this is the only second-half of 2011 book preview you will ever need.