The Bright Forever
A Novel
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
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
“Compelling . . . both harrowing and deeply felt.”—New York Daily News
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The halting, harrowing narrative of Martin's second novel (after 2001's Quakertown) draws upon multiple voices to piece together a tragedy with its own slippery backstory. On a summer evening in an "itty-bitty" Indiana town in the 1970s, nine-year-old Katie Mackey rides her bicycle to the library and never comes home. Her father, Junior Mackey, owns the town's glassworks, and to the town's residents the Mackeys are like the Kennedys, envied for their looks, their wealth and their picture-perfect life. Peeling back the layers of his characters, Martin slips easily into their darker, secret lives lives that may harbor clues to Katie's disappearance: Henry Dees, the reclusive math tutor who sometimes lurks in the Mackeys' house; Clare Mains, the widow shunned for remarrying out of loneliness; her galling husband, Raymond R., whose drug binges and blackouts occupy stretches of unaccounted-for time; Katie's parents, freshly tortured by their own tarnished past; and Katie's brother, 17-year-old Gilley, who seizes the chance to gain his father's approval by avenging Katie's death. Rich details and raw emotion mix as Martin, in engaging the human desire to excavate the truth, underscores its complex, elusive nature.
