Overview
A riveting novel of feeling and suspense in which grief and punishment become tragically intertwined.
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. Now Dwight must decide whether to run from his crime or to pay the price for what he did. Ethan Learner, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, has seen his orderly world shattered in a single moment, yet persists in the belief that he can find the unknown man who killed his son. Behind their stories are those of eight-year-old Emma, who can't stop thinking her brother's death was her fault, and of Grace, who must find the strength to keep herself and her family together, and to be the mother Emma so badly needs.
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 - an AudioBook that sounds like a thriller but opensup 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.
Editorials
Kit Reed
A triumph of formpacing and power. . .character-driven as it isit reads like a thrillerswift and complete. —New York Times Book ReviewMichiko Kakutani
A powerful and affecting novel. . .haunting. . .highly suspenseful. . .coompelling to read— The New York Times
Osborne
A poignant thriller. . .quietly breathtaking. —Vanity FairSandra Scofield
A pleasure to read. Suspense is redefined here. NewsdayKit Reed
A triumph of form, pacing and power. . .character-driven as it is, it reads like a thriller, swift and complete. -- New York Times Book ReviewNoonan
An unexpected pleasure. . .it will leave the reader entranced as well as moved. -- The Boston HeraldOsborne
A poignant thriller. . .quietly breathtaking. -- Vanity FairSandra Scofield
A pleasure to read. Suspense is redefined here. NewsdayTom De Haven
One of those rare -- very rare -- novels that you don't so much read as inhabit. . .But it's the novel's conclusion, as perfect as it is sudden, shocking and completely unexpected, that will stick in your memory. -- Entertainment WeeklyKirkus Reviews
The complex stages of guilt, grief, and recovery in the wake of a boy's hit-and-run death are exquisitely portrayed in this heartrending story by Schwartz (Bicycle Days, 1989), whose characterizations are as finely nuanced as they are sympathetic. Ten-year-old Josh Learner was killed by a hit-and-run driver that summer night in Connecticut, on the way back from a symphony picnic with his family; for the three adults—his parents and the driver of the speeding car—who saw what happened, it was as if their lives stopped then, too.His father Ethan, an English professor at a small college nearby, bears guilt for not having insisted that Josh come away from the road; his mother Grace is guilt-ridden as well, for having insisted they stop at the gas station so that Josh's sister Emma could use the restroom; and Dwight, running late after seeing a Red Sox game with his son and worried about the wrath of his ex at not having Sam back on time, not only has to bear the certainty of having killed someone Sam's age, but also the fact that the sleeping boy received a black eye from the accident—to go with the broken jaw that Dwight had given him accidentally on another occasion.
In the ensuing months, Ethan tries to carry on while Grace shuts down almost completely, losing her business and her bearings. The police investigation goes nowhere, and when Ethan blows up at the officer in charge, he guarantees there'll be no further help from that quarter. Dwight, meanwhile, has let his legal practice go to hell, alienated himself from Sam and everyone else, and taken to heavy drinking while waiting for someone to find him out. After more than a year, Ethan finallydoes—and as the first snow of that year falls, they enact a ritual of revenge both primal and fitting. Rarely have three lives in crisis been detailed with such compassion and care: a tragic, utterly absorbing tale.