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Reservation Road

John Burnham Schwartz

1998292 pagesabout 4–7 hours
1998
first published
  • 1998Phoenix House · 292 pages · ENGISBN 9781861591142
  • 1998Alfred A. Knopf · 292 pages · ENGISBN 9780375402630
  • 1999Phoenix · 301 pages · ENGISBN 9780753807637
  • 1999Thorndike Press · 456 pages · ENGISBN 9780786217403
  • 2008Penguin Random House · ENGISBN 9780099513186
  • 2012Corsair · ENGISBN 9781780334585
  • 1999Vintage Books · 309 pages · ENGISBN 9780375707032
  • 2007RH Audio · ENGISBN 9780739358122

At the close of a beautiful summer day near the quiet Connecticut town where they live, the Learner family - Ethan and Grace, their children, Josh and Emma - stop at a gas station on their way home from a concert. Josh Learner, lost in a ten-year-old's private world, is standing at the edge of the road when a car comes racing around the bend. He is hit and instantly killed. The car speeds away. From this moment forward, Reservation Road becomes a harrowing countdown to the confrontation between two very different men. The hit-and-run driver is a small-town lawyer named Dwight Arno, a man in desperate need of a second chance. Dwight is also the father of a ten-year-old boy, who was asleep in the car the night Josh Learner was killed. Now Dwight must decide whether to run from his crime or to pay the price for what he did. Ethan Learner, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, has seen his orderly world shattered in a single moment, yet persists in the belief that he can find the unknown man who killed his son. Behind their stories are those of eight-year-old Emma, who can't stop thinking her brother's death was her fault, and of Grace, who must find the strength to keep herself and her family together, and to be the mother Emma so badly needs.

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