A story of loss, defiance and change emerges from the magnificent setting of Cape Town in the late 1930s through the outbreak of World War II. Young Libka Hoffman is struggling with the loss of her father and the social conventions that frown upon her relationships with her most trusted friends. Libka's exploration of socially forbidden territory eventually brings her to expulsion from her school and ostracism by her peers.Told in moving and lyrical prose, In a Pale Blue Light conveys an authentic and rarely achieved insight into Jewish life in South Africa during the tumultuous times around World War II.

Lily Poritz Miller was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and came to the United States with her family when she was fifteen. She began her editorial career in book publishing in New York at The Macmillan Company and later McGraw-Hill, then moved to Toronto, where she was senior editor at McClelland and Stewart for eighteen years. She has written three plays, which were performed in New York and Toronto, and received a Samuel French national award for her play The Proud One. Her short stories were published in the anthology American Scene: New Voices. She has also written for film. In 2009 her novel In a Pale Blue Light was published to critical acclaim. She presently divides her time between Toronto and Mexico.

Lily Poritz Miller's profile page

It's always best when a book sneaks up on you; when, held firmly by skilled storytelling, you enter the final chapters and feel things gathering to an essence you still can't identify, something hidden in the totality of what you've learned about these lives and all that you recognize in them. This book's closing pages are a wonder of sleight-of-hand synthesis and catharsis: on the surface conventional and familiar, yet in their depths tapping to the heart of our shared humanity. Lily Poritz Miller's debut is quietly extraordinary. — Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail