The Bright Forever
A Novel
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3 months free
The Bright Forever
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Narrated by:
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various
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By:
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Lee Martin
About this listen
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A “cleanly written [and] artful . . . page-turner” (San Francisco Chronicle) about a nine-year-old girl’s disappearance and the lasting impact it has on her close-knit community
On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books.
This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a suspenseful, moving novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Playing fact, speculation, and contradiction off one another as the details unfold, Lee Martin creates a fast-paced story that’s as gripping as it is richly human. His beautiful, clear-eyed, spartan prose builds to an extremely nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of loss.
Memorable for its perceptions and power, The Bright Forever is a captivating and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truths.
©2005 Lee Martin (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
A Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and Book-of-the-Month Club
“With what consummate skill Lee Martin conjures up a small town in the grip of tragedy and how deftly he explores the way in which a casual remark, a brief kiss, a white lie can have the most terrible consequences. The Bright Forever is a remarkable and almost unbearably suspenseful novel.”—Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona and Eva Moves the Furniture
“Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever goes deep into the mystery of being alive on this earth. Written in the clearest prose, working back and forth over its complex story, and told in the dark, desperate, vivid voices of its various speakers, it holds you spellbound to the end, to its final, sad revelations.”—Kent Haruf, author of Eventide and Plainsong
“Like Winesburg, Ohio, The Bright Forever captures, in alternating voices, the individual acts of desperation that lead to a community’s sorrow. And, like Sherwood Anderson, Lee Martin is not happy to let guilt reside singularly or simply. This is a morally complex quilt, a page-turner that also insists on the reader’s participation in moral contemplation.”—Antonya Nelson, author of Female Trouble and Talking in Bed