Race Across the Sky
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Who would you run one hundred miles for?
Caleb Oberest is an ultramarathon runner, who severed all ties to his family to race brutal 100-mile marathons across mountains. Shane Oberest is a sales rep for a cutting-edge biotechnology firm, creating new cures for the diseases of our time. Shane has spent his life longing to connect with his older brother, but the distance between them was always too vast.
Caleb’s running group live by strict rules, but Caleb is breaking one of them. He has fallen in love with a new member and her infant daughter. When Caleb discovers that the baby has a fatal genetic disease, he reaches out to Shane. On the verge of becoming a father himself, Shane devises a plan that could save this baby and bring his lost brother home. But to succeed, both brothers will need to risk everything they have. And so each begins a dangerous race that will push them past their boundaries, and take all of Caleb’s legendry endurance to survive.
Derek Sherman’s authentic, compelling story of ultramarathons, biotechnology, and family takes us deep into new worlds and examines how far we will go for the people we love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Sherman's debut novel, ultra-marathoner and extreme endurance athlete Caleb Oberest has been estranged from his family for a decade. He has immersed himself in a cultish running club overseen by a charismatic and manipulative "energy-healing" guru who not only trains his runners, but also dictates every aspect of their lives in their Colorado collective. For years, Caleb's brother, Shane, has been desperate to reconnect with him, and when the two come crashing back together, it is amid extraordinary circumstances. When a new member arrives to the running club with a sickly infant, Caleb's isolation and complete focus on extreme distance competition breaks down as he quickly becomes attached, and ultimately devoted, to doing whatever he can to save the child's life. He reaches out to his brother, who has become a biotechnology salesman, for help. Both are driven to take extreme risks and make superhuman sacrifices in their efforts to cure the ailing child. While Sherman neatly weaves two narrative lines and effectively builds tension, the motivations driving the characters seem thin and too reliant on the intensity of ultra-marathon mindset to propel them to through such risk and hardship. The novel will appeal most to readers willing to overlook plausibility for the excitement of extreme circumstances.
