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Book Title

Broken River

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
J. Robert Lennon
Body
A modest house in upstate New York. One in the morning. Three people—a couple and their child—hurry out the door, but it’s too late for them. As the virtuosic and terrifying opening scene of Broken River unfolds, a spectral presence seems to be watching with cold and mysterious interest. Soon the house lies abandoned, and years later a new family moves in.

Karl, Eleanor, and their daughter, Irina, arrive from New York City in the wake of Karl’s infidelity to start anew. Karl tries to stabilize his flailing art career. Eleanor, a successful commercial novelist, eagerly pivots in a new creative direction. Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Irina becomes obsessed with the brutal murders that occurred in the house years earlier. And, secretly, so does her mother. As the ensemble cast grows to include Louis, a hapless salesman in a carpet warehouse who is haunted by his past, and Sam, a young woman newly reunited with her jailbird brother, the seemingly unrelated crime that opened the story becomes ominously relevant.

Hovering over all this activity looms a gradually awakening narrative consciousness that watches these characters lie to themselves and each other, unleashing forces that none of them could have anticipated and that put them in mortal danger. Broken River is a cinematic, darkly comic, and sui generis psychological thriller that could only have been written by J. Robert Lennon.

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List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-772-6
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
288
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
The most inventive and entertaining novel to date from “a master of the dark arts” (Kelly Link)

About the Author

J. Robert  Lennon
J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels, including Subdivision and Broken River, and three story collections, Let Me Think, Pieces for the Left Hand, and See You in Paradise. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

http://jrobertlennon.com/
More by author

Praise

  • Broken River is a novel that watches as its own plot unfolds, wondering at the way that ‘everything is exquisitely interconnected, malevolent, and dangerous.’”The Wall Street Journal
  • “[Broken River] proves, as ever, that the novel can do things nothing but the novel can do.”—Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times
  • “Virtuosic. . . . [A] dark and brooding thriller.”San Francisco Chronicle
     
  • #1 Indie Next Pick for May 2017

    Named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, and MPR News'
    "The Thread"
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