Reservation Road, John Burnham Schwartz
Reservation Road, John Burnham Schwartz
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Reservation Road

Author: John Burnham Schwartz

Narrator: Stanley Tucci, John Shea, Anne Twomey

Abridged: 2 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/03/2006

Synopsis

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--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.

About The Author

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of five acclaimed novels, including The Commoner, Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days, and Reservation Road, which was made into a motion picture based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into two dozen languages, and his writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. A winner of the Lyndhurst Foundation Award for mastery in the art of fiction, Schwartz has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently literary director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son, Garrick.Stanley Tucci's film work includes roles in Big Night (which he also codirected), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, The Pelican Brief, The Devil Wears Prada, and Billy Bathgate. He was nominated for an Emmy for his role on the television series Murder One, and has had roles in a number of Broadway productions, including Brighton Beach Memoirs and The Iceman Cometh.John Shea's many film appearances include Stealing Home and Missing. He is the recipient of the Obie Award for his performance in The Dining Room, and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his work in American Days.Anne Twomey is an award-winning American actress who has starred in many television shows, including LA Law, Third Watch, and Seinfeld. For her theater work, she has won a Theatre World Award and been nominated for Tony and Drama Desk Awards. Twomey has also narrated numerous audiobooks, including works by Dean Koontz and Joyce Carol Oates.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Fabian on September 02, 2018

It's a story we've all heard before--the loss of a child and its subsequent devastating effect on the parents. This is that story, trimmed & nicely-paced, & the conclusion, perhaps its one original point, is memorable indeed. This is no Andre Dubus III however, and it shows. The poignancy it reaches......more

Goodreads review by Will on October 10, 2011

Parallels abound. Ethan is the bereft father, Josh, his lost son. Dwight is the damaged driver, Sam his child, damaged by dad in a different way. How each copes with the aftermath is the core of the tale here. Dwight runs over a young boy, then flees the scene, fearful of the impact the accident mig......more

Goodreads review by Debby on September 21, 2012

It's hard to say you "really liked" a book about the death of a 10-yr-old boy from a hit and run. The book is narrated from 3 perspectives on the events of that night - Josh's father Ethan, Josh's mother Grace and Dwight the guy who hit Josh and kept on driving. Why? What will happen to each of them......more

Goodreads review by Nick on March 11, 2019

This was a powerful and affecting read - mainly due to the subject (how the death of a ten year-old boy in a hit and run accident affects the families of the bereaved and the guilty party who did not stop) but much credit is due also to the starkness, the rawness, the sadness of the writing. It was......more

Goodreads review by Webster on May 20, 2013

I picked this book because I thought it was something completely different. I thought it was the book they made the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio about, Revolutionary Road. It was a silly mistake and after a little bit of confusion I continued on. There was a major problem with the book, dealing with......more

Quotes

"This is a shattering book, imagined with startling emotional precision and generosity. And though it begins in catastrophe, Reservation Road turns out to be a kind of map of connectedness: Touch a child here and the whole world trembles out of orbit; everyone bleeds; finally, perhaps, after great pain, everyone heals. John Burnham Schwartz is awfully young to own this much wisdom, but there it is, on every page."
--Rosellen Brown

"A powerful and affecting novel...haunting...highly suspenseful...compelling to read."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Spellbinding...a haunting tale"
--Booklist

"A poignant thriller...quietly breathtaking...a suspenseful literary novel"
--Betsey Osborne, Vanity Fair

"A pleasure to read. Suspense is redefined here..."
--Sandra Scofield, Newsday

"A lovely book, full of life and feeling"
--Peter Matthiessen

"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."        
--Tom Dehaven, Entertainment Weekly

"A beautiful novel. An important novel"
--David Bowman, New York Observer

"Both a beautiful, wrenching story of redemption, and a novel of exquisite suspense"
--Anne Lamott

"A first-rate work of fiction disguised as a page-turning thriller"
--David Halberstam

"An unexpected pleasure...It will leave the reader entranced as well as moved."
--Erica Noonan, Boston Herald

"A non-stop read...a wonderful writer"
--Ward Just

"A triumph of form, pacing and power...character-driven as it is, it reads like a thrille, swift and complete."
--Kit Reed, New York Times Book Review

"It possesses a conclusion of such power that it would be a literary crime to reveal it."
--Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

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