A gentle forensic novel centering on grief and restoration, “The Labyrinth” is my first Amanda Lohrey and it will not be my last. When her artist son becomes incarcerated due to homicidal negligence, a woman abandons her normal life and buys a ramshackle hut on the southeast coast of Australia, close enough to her son’s prison. Reeling, she seizes upon the redemptive idea of building a labyrinth, one of those twisty physical structure we all remember from our childhoods. With no grand plan, she is forced to rely on others—locals and an illegal immigrant—and gradually, hope for the future offers itself as a possibility. Describing the plot above does not do justice to the hypnotic plot and prose, to the interplay of real humans, to the interplay of ideas. The Labyrinth is no thriller but it is a page turner, and a meditative one at that.
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