The Arsonist by Sue Miller

From the best-selling author of While I Was Gone and The Senator’s Wife, a superb new novel about a family and a community tested when an arsonist begins setting fire to the homes of the summer people in a small New England town.

Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for fifteen years, Frankie Rowley has come home—home to the small New Hampshire village of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Then another house burns, and another, always the houses of the summer people. In a town where people have never bothered to lock their doors, social fault lines are opened, and neighbors begin to regard one another with suspicion. Against this backdrop of menace and fear, Frankie begins a passionate, unexpected affair with the editor of the local paper, a romance that progresses with exquisite tenderness and heat toward its own remarkable risks and revelations.

Suspenseful, sophisticated, rich in psychological nuance and emotional insight, The Arsonist is vintage Sue Miller—a finely wrought novel about belonging and community, about how and where one ought to live, about what it means to lead a fulfilling life. One of our most elegant and engrossing novelists at her inimitable best.


I really wanted to love this book, it had so much potential! Frankie returns home from Africa to her parents’ house in a small New England town. Once a summer house, her parents are now living full time there. While Frankie reflects about a soured relationship and what she wants to do with the rest of her life, summer houses throughout town are being set on fire. Tensions heighten between wealthier summer people and the locals. 

I liked so many elements of this ruminative novel, but many of them never fully gelled for me. The strange, uncomfortable developing relationships between the summer people and the locals was interesting. I wanted more. The arsons steadily build in terms of frequency and potential injury, but even that peters out, and I thought the resolution was a bit of a let down. 

I’m a big fan of complicated relationships in books. I loved the friction between Frankie and her mother, Sylvia, with her father’s declining health working as a catalyst. But once again, I felt that there was too little. For all the fires and familial dynamics, there are a lot of scenes revolving around a brooding Frankie. It didn’t help that I liked Frankie less than both her parents. I also didn’t feel compelled over the big romance in the book. 

Yet I do think this is a novel worth reading. It poses interesting questions, and the whole thing has a very cinematic feel. 

Have you read The Arsonist? What did you think?