Layla, an aspiring poet and third string editor in Boston, brings her two children to visit her former in-laws at a lakeside cottage in rural Maine. There she is greeted with wariness, and there she discovers love and trouble across the water. Set in the early 1980s, with interludes glimpsing the past, Layla and the Lake releases vivid emotional scenes from both the United States and Canada into an idyllic but tense setting. Gradually, a labyrinth of faulty ethics, expectations, and boundaries is revealed as Layla struggles to mend her messy life and protect her children’s future. The story exposes the harsh fallout from a failed marriage and a quest for writing with courage in the midst of a doomed affair that itself takes place amid a family crisis. Layla and the Lake is the story of a family that is no longer a family. Its narrative mines the riches of the written word, the awakening of conscience in even the very young, and the inexplicable beauty of natural existence.