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Title details for Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz - Available

Northwest Corner

A Novel

by John Burnham Schwartz
Various
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 2 copies available
The New York Times Book Review called Reservation Road “a triumph,” and the novel was universally acclaimed. Now, in a brilliant literary performance by one of our most compelling and compassionate writers, John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road’s unforgettable characters in a superb new work of fiction that stands magnificently on its own. Northwest Corner is a riveting story about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges.
Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he’s hidden.
Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam’s sense of guilt is as crushing as his father’s. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.
Told in the resonant voices of everyday people gripped in the emotional riptide of lived life, Northwest Corner is at once tough and heart-lifting, an urgent, powerful story about family bonds that can never be broken and the wayward roads that lead us back to those we love.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 26, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307915054
      • File size: 216272 KB
      • Duration: 07:30:33

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      One of the advantages of having five narrators is the variety--the pleasure of each handoff from one to the other. That is especially true in this performance but not in a positive way. The narration of this sequel to Schwartz's first novel, RESERVATION ROAD, only emphasizes the book's poor writing. The internal dialogue of Schwartz's characters is so infuriatingly full of speech making, aphorisms, and labored metaphors that you quickly lose patience with all of them, and that, unfortunately, extends to the poor narrators forced to inhabit them. You are meant to have sympathy for a family torn apart by a past accident and a present-day violent incident, but the writing and performances make it impossible to get on board with any of them. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 21, 2011
      The literary tradition of the middle-class American male as a creaky vessel teetering on the verge of moral meltdown yet struggling to reconstruct himself has found its latest and arguably most adept practitioner in Schwartz (Reservation Road). Like Johnny Hake and Harry Angstrom before him, Dwight Arno is a man who has done wrong. A Connecticut tax lawyer disbarred after a fatal hit and run accident, he does not expect a chance at redemption, but it arrives in the form of his son, Sam, who makes a mad dash across the country and shows up at his estranged father's front door after a vicious bar fight puts an end to his dreams of baseball stardom. Pontificating discourses masquerading as stream-of-consciousness mar the narrative at times and inject a sanctimonious streak, but Schwartz is otherwise exceptional at describing the chemistry of desire, creating emotional tension, and making his characters feel more like flesh and blood than fictional constructs. Imaginative and taut, Schwartz's writing is seamless and infinitely inspired.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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