In the River Sweet - Softcover

Henley, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385721323 ISBN 13: 9780385721325

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004

Synopsis

National Book Award finalist Patricia Henley captivates us with this engrossing novel of a woman whose long-held secret will transform her life and her marriage.

From all appearances, Ruth Anne Bond is enviably lucky. Her husband, Johnny, still treats her like a young lover. Her grown daughter is a staunch friend. Her steady work and devotion to the church have quietly made her a pillar of the community. Then one long Indiana summer brings some unexpected communiqués—including one she has both craved and feared for thirty years. As long-hidden truths threaten to emerge, for the first time in her marriage Ruth Anne is faced with memories she and Johnny never discuss: of a year spent in Saigon in 1968—and a past she has yet to acknowledge. Probing questions of family and faith, Patricia Henley offers us a tender, far-sighted novel about seeking answers and achieving grace.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“With a poet's eye for the essential and a novelist's sweeping vision across space and time, Patricia Henley illuminates here the wounds and yearnings of us all–the inherent destructive power of long-held secrets, the never-ending search for spiritual wholeness, our deluded belief that a lasting state of grace is always just out of reach. Gorgeously written and suffused with wisdom, In the River Sweet is an absolutely superb novel from one of our very best!”
–Andre Dubus III

“In her remarkable new novel, In the River Sweet, Patricia Henley has drawn directly on the events of the Vietnam War and its aftermath and yet given them the universal resonance of high art. And she's done so within a compellingly readable story. For those seeking to consider Vietnam beyond the parochialism of politics, this book is essential reading.”
–Robert Olen Butler

“With their secrets, bad choices, mistakes, and simple stubborn endurance, Patricia Henley's people are as close to me as my own. Like family, they resonate. Like the best of us, they endure and even occasionally triumph.
“In the River Sweet gives us a close look at the intimate damage within an all-too-normal American family. By the time I closed the book, I was nodding my head and getting ready to call a few friends: this is what it feels like, this is how we live, and endure, and yes, damn it, go on when we think we cannot.
“I'd swim a river to read any novel Patrica Henley writes. For this one, I'd swim an ocean.”
–Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“Patricia Henley has gifts aplenty to vividly bring to life Saigon during the Vietnam War, a Catholic girl's upbringing in America, and the rich history of a marriage, one that must undergo a transformation to survive. She expertly weaves the threads of her characters' past and present, at home and abroad, into the compelling whole of In the River Sweet.”
–Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World and The Book of Ruth

About the Author

Patricia Henley’s first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and The New Yorker Best Fiction Book Award. Henley has also written two books of poetry, Learning to Die and Back Roads, and four story collections: Friday Night at Silver Star, which won the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award; The Secret of Cartwheels; Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories; and Other Heartbreaks. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and Northwest Review, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize anthology. For 27 years she taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Purdue University. She lives in Frostburg, Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385721323
• ISBN 13: 9780385721325
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304