Bergen’s absorbing and lightly plotted work of psychological fiction focuses on Lucille Black, an introspective psychiatrist in her fifties whose practice centres on psychotherapy rather than the prescribing of psychoactive-drugs. Lucille has been receiving distressing phone calls and text messages from her daughter, Libby, a medical student who, feeling uncertain about her chosen path in life, has recently travelled to Thailand, mainly because it was the cheapest place to go. It’s unclear if Libby is attempting to escape or to discover herself—perhaps both. The young woman has fallen in with a group of young people—young women, to be precise—who live on a compound in the Thai coastal city of Pattaya. Lucille initially refers to this group as a “club”, later as a “cult”, and at one point, actually invokes Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s run by a charismatic huckster called Shane, who practises some form of psychotherapy on his young female devotees. He likes the girls thin, clad in shapeless denim dresses, and their hair simply braided. Later, the reader learns that the feistier they are, the more attractive he finds them.

Ostensibly, the group’s aim is to teach English and sewing to young girls sold by their families into the sex trade for the price of a pickup truck. Libby tells her mother she’s in love with Shane. She says he loves her and he wants them to be married. Lucille believes her daughter is lost. She resolves that before travelling to the August wedding of a young male “friend” in France, she’ll first travel to Thailand to rescue Libby, wrest her from Shane’s psychological grip, or at least talk some sense into her.

Bergen’s book, a companion to his 2010 novel The Matter with Morris (which I haven’t yet read) isn’t just about a mother-daughter relationship. In Out of Mind, Lucille takes stock of her life, including her childhood and the failure of her marriage to Morris a decade before this story is set. Prior to the marital dissolution, the couple’s soldier son, Martin, had been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, and Morris, a newspaper columnist, had gone off the rails corresponding with and then visiting a sympathetic female reader of his column and progressing to using pricey escort services. When the two divorced, Lucille, the responsible partner and the higher earner, had to hand over a small fortune to her husband, as part of the settlement—a matter she still resents.

Rarely does a reader know a character as well as she knows Lucille by the end of the book. Those who appreciate a plot-driven novel might not find this one to their liking, but Bergen’s sensitive, nuanced, skillfully unembellished writing about the complexity of human relationships and the challenge of finding balance in life will reward those who value character-driven literary fiction. I’ll admit that I did not find some aspects of the novel’s conclusion wholly satisfying. I refer here to Lucille’s fairly long and intimate conversation with a new acquaintance, which seemed too convenient to convince. Ultimately, however, a decision she makes at the end testifies to a kind of growth and acceptance of things as they are. ( )