Reconstructionist - Softcover

Nick Arvin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099538075 ISBN 13: 9780099538073

Publisher: Windmill, 2011

Synopsis

At a loose end after college, Ellis Barstow drifts back to his hometown and takes a job as a reconstructionist - investigating and recreating the details of fatal car accidents. Ellis forms a bond with his boss John Boggs, who believes that if two cars meeting at an intersection can be called an accident, then anything can - where we live, what we do, even who we fall in love with. For Ellis these things are certainly no accident and he harbours two secrets of his own. The car crash that killed his half-brother is a memory that still haunts him, and his feelings for John's wife threaten to blow apart the men's lives. As Ellis tries to make sense of his own life, the story's momentum builds to a desperate race towards confrontation, reconciliation and survival.

About this title

Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: You wouldn't think that earning a pair of mechanical engineering degrees would lend itself to fine literature, but Nick Arvin is an exception: His thoughtful, offbeat, original sophomore novel, The Reconstructionist, has a caliber as unexpected as its author's. Antihero Ellis Barstow, whose half brother Christopher died young in a car crash, makes his living by conducting auto accident postmortems. He also loves his boss's wife, who--not coincidentally--was Christopher's high school girlfriend. It sounds complicated, but in the end all these likably flawed people are just trying to answer the same two questions: What happened? And whose fault was it? --Mia Lipman

From the Back Cover

One instant can change an entire lifetime.

As a boy, Ellis Barstow heard the sound of the collision that killed Christopher, his older half brother—an accident that would haunt him for years. A decade later, searching for purpose after college, Ellis takes a job as a forensic reconstructionist, investigating and re-creating the details of fatal car accidents—under the guidance of the irascible John Boggs, who married Christopher's girlfriend. Ellis takes naturally to the work, fascinated by the task of trying to find reason, and justice, within the seemingly random chaos of smashed glass and broken lives. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own—not only his memory of the car crash that killed his brother but also his feelings for Boggs's wife, Heather, which soon lead to a full-blown affair. And when Boggs inexplicably disappears, Ellis sets out to find him . . . and to try to make sense of the crash site his own life has become.

Raising a host of universal questions—Can science ever explain matters of the heart? Can we ever escape the gravitational pull of the past?—Nick Arvin's novel is at once deeply moving and compulsively readable.

About this edition

• Publisher: Windmill
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0099538075
• ISBN 13: 9780099538073
• Binding: Paperback