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.
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.
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Reviews
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.
Haunting .... A powerful and affecting novel.
A triumph...character-driven as it is, it reads like a thriller, swift and complete.
A dark and irresistible miracle: a heartbreaking thriller.
[Schwartz is] a fine writer....Reservation Road is a page-turner, but along the way there is much to linger over.
The redemption in Reservation Road is unexpected, compassionate and powerful, making it moving in a way that few novels are.
Reservation Road is a terrific novel, both a page-turner and a discerning portrayal of the psychic costs of self-delusion.
So beautifully written and compelling that you can't will yourself to put it down.
A poignant thriller...the novel's resolution is quietly breathtaking.
A deeply moving, darkly satisfying novel.
This book possesses a conclusion of such power that it would be a literary crime to reveal it.