Ash Falls - Softcover

Read, Warren

3.47

201 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1632460475 ISBN 13: 9781632460479

Publisher: Ig Publishing, 2017

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*Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY): GOLD award for Best Regional Fiction; 2018 *Foreword Reviews INDIES: SILVER award for Best Fiction (general, adult); 2017 *National Indie Excellence Award: Winner, Best Regional Fiction--West; 2018 *2018 National Indie Excellence Award: Special Sponsor's Prize
A routine prisoner transfer on a rural highway ends with the bus upside-down in a ravine, the driver dead of a heart attack, and convicted murderer Ernie Luntz on the loose, his eyes fixed on the mountain range in the distance, over which lies his hometown of Ash Falls.
Set in a moss-draped, Pacific Northwest mountain town, Ash Falls is the story of a closely connected community both held together and torn apart by one man's single act of horrific violence. As the residents of Ash Falls--which include Ernie's ex-wife and teenage son--wait on edge, wondering if and when Ernie Luntz will reappear, they come to discover that they are held prisoner not by the killer in the woods outside their town, but by the chains of their own creation.
A tension-filled, multi-character exploration of collapsed relationships, carefully guarded secrets and the psychological strain of living in a place that is at once both idyllic and crippling, Ash Falls is a picturesque and haunting novel that belongs beside the work of such classic contemporary American writers as Kent Haruf, Leif Enger, Smith Henderson and Ron Carlson.
Warren Read is the author of a 2008 memoir, The Lyncher in Me (Borealis Books), about his discovery that his great-grandfather had incited a lynching in 1920. His fiction has been published in Hot Metal Bridge, Mud Season Review, Sliver of Stone, Inklette, Switchback and The Drowning Gull. In addition, he has had two short plays directed and produced by Tony winner Dinah Manoff. Warren earned his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

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About the Author:

Warren Read is the author of a memoir, The Lyncher in Me” (2008, Borealis Books) about how his great-grandfather incited a riot that led to the lynching of three black men. His fiction has been published in Hot Metal Bridge, Mud Season Review, Inklette and Switchback Magazine.

Review:

(Read) meticulously weaves the gritty, hard-knock lives of many men and women from this impoverished, rural town in mountainous Washington into "tight little complicated knots."...A moody, haunting foray into rural Americana in the mold of Daniel Woodrell and Christian Kiefer.
--Kirkus Reviews

In this fine first novel, Read deftly portrays the competing feelings of suffocation and loneliness that can breed in small towns. Pair this with Daniel Woodrell's marvelous Tomato Red."
--Booklist

Though set in a bleak place at a bleak time, Read's novel ultimately is one of hope. As it winds to its conclusion, each character finds a key to closing the self-created distance between who they are and who they'd like to be, culminating in an extraordinary Christmas Eve act of love. Most readers will enjoy.
--Library Journal

A well-crafted, subtle psychological thriller.
--Publisher's Weekly

A stunning display of grit made alluring. Both beautiful and stark, Ash Falls is a slice-of-life portrait that gives color to the grayest of times.
--Shelf Awareness

Ash Falls is a dynamite debut: keenly observed, well-paced, and dripping with atmosphere. Read's gritty, hard-knock characters walk off the page.

--Jonathan Evison, best-selling author of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and West of Here

Bringing to life an astonishing range of characters who are intricately connected with each other, Warren Read's Ash Falls vividly depicts an out-of-the-way place and a peculiarly American way of life. These pages are memorable and intensely compelling.

--David Huddle, author of The Faulkes Chronicle and My Immaculate Assassin

Warren Read's Ash Falls is a rare, multi-faceted treasure: at once a gripping narrative of tragedy and its aftermath and a psychologically rich portrait of small-town life in the contemporary rural West, the novel is above all a nuanced exploration of isolation and the solace of intimacy. All his characters--from an aging mink farmer, to a middle-aged pot dealer, to a single mother, to a gay teenager with an escaped convict for a father--are so real and complex I sometimes forget I haven't encountered them in the actual world. This is a book to read, read again, and pass on to all your literature-loving friends.

--Scott Nadelson, author of Between You and Me and Aftermath

ASH FALLS is a subtle novel that interweaves the stories of these characters into a single world. Every action ties in to every other action, evoking the mystery of how individuals (and fate) form communities, and communities (and fate) form individuals. It is a world of common decencies and common cruelties, kindness and endurance and compassion and betrayals, well-tended old scars, and freshly opened new ones.

---David Allan Cates, author of the novels, Freeman Walker, Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home, and Tom Connor's Gift

Warren Read's Ash Falls is one of those compelling novels that works into your awareness in layers until, almost without knowing it, you find yourself involved with a whole community of intersecting lives. This is sophisticated storytelling, quiet and unpredictable and gorgeous. Read creates characters with such precision and exactitude that the book has the quality of a Vermeer painting, of people captured in moments of their ordinary, miraculous, so-lit lives.

--Kent Meyers, author of New York Times bestsellers The Work of Wolves and Twisted Tree.

Warren Read spins an engrossing and eloquent narrative that sharpens our moral conscience through the power of a great story. Ash Falls is a gift of a book, and a delicious place to lose yourself in an immersing read.

Carol Cassella, best-selling author of Oxygen, Gemini and Healer