RIVER OF HEAVEN
A Novel
by Lee Martin
Now available in paperback!
Three Rivers Press / Random House
www.randomhouse.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-38125-5
$14.00 Trade Paperback
Shaye Areheart Books / Random House
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-38124-8
$24.00 Hardcover
Fiction
“If you don’t know Lee Martin, you should….[RIVER OF HEAVEN] is a page-turner, both tender and tough, with real insight into how people live and breathe and love and worry.”
– Lincoln Journal Star
Also available:
THE BRIGHT FOREVER
A Novel
by Lee Martin
Three Rivers Press / Random House
April 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-20986-3
$14.00 Trade Paperback
“In RIVER OF HEAVEN, Lee Martin has created that rare thing: a literary page-turner. This is a story about the corrosive power of a childhood secret and the way our lives are shaped as much by what we withold as what we reveal. An elegantly structured, powerful and original novel, full of heart.”
– Dani Shapiro
RIVER OF HEAVEN is a favorite with book clubs and reading groups. A reading group guide is available for download below, too.
Buy this book from your favorite locally owned and operated Midwest independent bookseller! Click here for the new searchable directory of our member bookstores.
MBA Bookseller Information
Order from your Random House rep or through wholesalers. Your Random House sales rep can advise you about coop advertising, too.
MBA and the publisher would love to have your comments, reviews, and praise for this fascinating book. Please send them to us so we can share your endorsements with your fellow MBA booksellers and with your customers!
RIVER OF HEAVEN is a great choice for reading groups, as is Lee Martin’s earlier novel THE BRIGHT FOREVER. (See the reading group guide and other materials below for discussion topic ideas.) If you would like to find out more about author Lee Martin and the possibility of events or book club phone conversations with him, please contact Jay Sones, Marketing Manager for Three Rivers Press, at jsones@randomhouse.com , who will connect you with the right publicist.
We have lots of good promo materials available for you here – an excellent article about the author in Poets & Writers, a reading group guide, etc.
Downloads
- Midwest Connections Rebate Form (PDF)
- Poets and Writers article about Lee Martin (PDF)
- Reading group guide (PDF)
- Small B&W print ad (PDF)
- Book photo (JPG) — trade paperback
- Book photo (JPG) – hardcover
- Author photo (JPG)
- Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials
About the Book
“RIVER OF HEAVEN” is one of the best books I’ve read this season. The author has created characters who are so real and emotionally complex in their flaws and actions that I became completely immersed in their story. Sam and the others have stayed with me ever since.”
- Kati Gallagher, MBA Assistant Director“Few writers could unfold Sam’s history with the grace and compassion of Lee Martin…a wise and humane novel, a story of cowardice and courage and the torturous path between them.”
- Kathryn Harrison
On an April evening in 1955, Dewey Finn died on the railroad tracks outside the Midwestern town of Mt. Gilead, Illinois. The mystery of his death still confounds the people of this small town.
RIVER OF HEAVEN begins some fifty years later and centers on the story of Dewey’s boyhood friend Sam Brady, whose solitary adult life is much formed by what really went on in the days leading up to that fateful evening at the tracks. It’s a story Sam would do anything to keep from telling, but when his brother Cal returns to Mt. Gilead after decades of self-exile, the truth threatens to come to the surface.
Past and present collide in Lee Martin’s compassionate novel of a man, his brother, and the dark secret that both connects and divides them. Powerful and captivating, RIVER OF HEAVEN is about the high cost of living a lie, the chains that bind us to our past, and the obligations we have to those we love, and the redemption that lies on the other side of confession.
LEE MARTIN is the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Bright Forever; a novel, Quakertown; a story collection, The Least You Need to Know; and two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones. He has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, a Lawrence Foundation Award, and the Glenna Luschei Prize. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he directs the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.
