Reservation Road

(Paperback)

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

At the close of a beautiful summer day near the quiet Connecticut town where they live, the Learner family - Ethan and Grace, their children, Josh and Emma - stop at a gas station on their way home from a concert. Josh Learner, lost in a ten-year-old's private world, is standing at the edge of the road when a car comes racing around the bend. He is hit and instantly killed. The car speeds away.

From this moment forward, Reservation Road becomes a harrowing countdown to the confrontation between two very different men. The hit-and-run driver is a small-town lawyer named Dwight Arno, a man in desperate need of a second chance. Dwight is also the father of a ten-year-old boy, who was asleep in the car the night Josh Learner was killed.

In a gripping narrative woven from the voices of Ethan, Dwight, and Grace, Reservation Road tells the story of two ordinary families facing an extraordinary crisis--a book that reads like a thriller but opens up a world rich with psychological nuance and emotional wisdom. Reservation Road explores the terrain of grief even as it astonishes with unexpected redemption: powerful and wrenching and impossible to put down.

Reviews

A triumph...character-driven as it is, it reads like a thriller, swift and complete. - The New York Times Book Review

A poignant thriller...the novel's resolution is quietly breathtaking. - Vanity Fair

Haunting .... A powerful and affecting novel. - The New York Times

A dark and irresistible miracle: a heartbreaking thriller. - Los Angeles Times

A deeply moving, darkly satisfying novel. - The Boston Globe

So beautifully written and compelling that you can't will yourself to put it down. - The Denver Post

Thrums with suspense and moral ambiguity...This is one of those rare-very rare-novels that you don't so much read a inhabit and that makes everyday life seem altogether mysterious. - Entertainment Weekly

This book possesses a conclusion of such power that it would be a literary crime to reveal it. - USA Today

Author Bio

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of the acclaimed novels The Commoner, Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay.His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and son.