Intention
A Novel
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Intention
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How many lives can collide over the course of a single spring day? In Intention, Lichtman’s quietly electrifying third novel, a chance encounter sets in motion a chain of reckonings that exposes the fault lines between art, ethics, and responsibility.
Birgitta is a celebrated mystery writer whose career was launched by a novel drawn from a real family’s tragedy—and whose account of that book’s publication has become part of her public legend. Noah is a journalist assigned to interview her about her efforts to support Ukrainians amid political crisis. When they meet, admiration and suspicion intermingle: Noah is dazzled by Birgitta’s elegance and success but questions both the ethics of her work and the story she tells about how her defining book came to be published; Birgitta, in turn, bristles at Noah’s judgments about her privilege and moral authority, while feeling diminished by family life. Their brief exchange reverberates throughout the day, unsettling assumptions each holds about goodness, guilt, and what it means to do the “right thing.”
Told in alternating perspectives, Intention traces the nearly invisible turns of fate that pull people toward—or away from—one another. With intelligence, restraint, and moral clarity, Lichtman examines the liberties writers take with real lives, and whether acts of generosity can ever fully redeem past harm. At once witty and grave, Intention is a novel of regret and accountability—a mature, searching work that captures how quickly, and irrevocably, everything can change.
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Critic Reviews
“Hypnotic, exquisitely written, and closely observed. In Lichtman’s writing, the present is uncanny, the world is unstable, and power dynamics shift from moment to moment. A clear-eyed yet generous interrogation of our good intentions from one of the smartest writers of his generation.”
—Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair
“If you ever wondered what would happen if Milan Kundera wrote a Virginia Woolf novel, then you’re in luck: Lichtman’s brilliant novel of ideas explores the notion of what we owe to others, both perfect strangers and imperfect loved ones, and our ironic tendency to see their lives clearly while remaining perilously blind to our own–and he does all this in an elegantly subtle way that nudges its two main characters, ever so gently, toward the light. A sly, lovely, moving gem of a book.”
—Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State
—Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair
“If you ever wondered what would happen if Milan Kundera wrote a Virginia Woolf novel, then you’re in luck: Lichtman’s brilliant novel of ideas explores the notion of what we owe to others, both perfect strangers and imperfect loved ones, and our ironic tendency to see their lives clearly while remaining perilously blind to our own–and he does all this in an elegantly subtle way that nudges its two main characters, ever so gently, toward the light. A sly, lovely, moving gem of a book.”
—Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State
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