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