When Katharine Smyth first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse, she was a student at Oxford, sharing an English sitting room with her beloved father. After his death, Smyth returned to that cherished novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Moving between the New England of her childhood and Woolf's Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, Smyth explores universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of Woolf's most demanding and rewarding novel, Smyth crafts an elegant reminder of literature's ability to clarify and console.

"This is a transcendent book, not a simple meditation on one woman's loss, but a reflection on all of our losses, on loss itself, on how to remember and commemorate our dead."—Washington Post