On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books. This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever , a suspenseful, deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Keeping fact, speculation, and contradiction playing off one another as the details unfold, author Lee Martin creates a fast-paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. His beautiful, clear-eyed prose builds to an extremely nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss. Reminiscent of books such as The Little Friend and The Lovely Bones , but most memorable for its own perceptions and power, The Bright Forever is a compelling and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truth. Thirty years after the fact, a schoolteacher in a small Indiana town narrates this gripping tale of a crime and the lives it has forever changed. On a quiet evening in July, nine-year-old Katie Mackey leaves home for the library, and never returns. In chapters written in different voices and jumping back and forth between that day and four days later, the author carefully lays out his simple yet mesmerizing plot, gradually revealing the dark secrets held by those involved--secrets that, when woven together, propel the action to its seemingly preordained conclusion. The teacher, Henry Dees, is a lonely misfit who longs for a child of his own. His neighbor hides a drug addiction even from his wife, and his discovery of Henry's secret longings gives him a sense of power. This lethal combination leads to a horrendous crime that leaves Henry wracked with guilt, knowing he'll "always be living that summer in that town." Martin's novel is hard to put down, as these dark and intertwined lives march inexorably to tragedy. Deborah Donovan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “With what consummate skill Lee Martin conjures up a small town in the grip of tragedy and how deftly he explores the way in which a casual remark, a brief kiss, a white lie can have the most terrible consequences. The Bright Forever is a remarkable and almost unbearably suspenseful novel.” —Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona and Eva Moves the Furniture “Lee Martin’s The Bright Forever goes deep into the mystery of being alive on this earth. Written in the clearest prose, working back and forth over its complex story, and told in the dark, desperate, vivid voices of its various speakers, it holds you spellbound to the end, to its final, sad revelations.” —Kent Haruf, author of Eventide and Plainsong “Like Winesburg, Ohio , The Bright Forever captures, in alternating voices, the individual acts of desperation that lead to a community’s sorrow. And, like Sherwood Anderson, Lee Martin is not happy to let guilt reside singularly or simply. This is a morally complex quilt, a page-turner that also insists on the reader’s participation in moral contemplation.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Female Trouble and Talking in Bed “I read The Bright Forever in one sitting. I couldn’t put it down. Part Mystic River , part Winesburg, Ohio , this harrowing and beautiful book is one of the most powerful novels I’ve read in years and heralds the breakout of a remarkable talent.” —Bret Lott, author of A Song I Knew by Heart and Jewel “ The Bright Forever will get under your skin with its exquisite psychology and fine-tuned suspense. Lee Martin has created a world of aching beauty and terrible loss.” —Jean Thompson, author of City Boy and Wide Blue Yonder “ The Bright Forever is ravishing. . . . Lee Martin’s characters, dear readers, are us—riven and bedeviled, our souls gone grainy and rank, our hearts busted and beating heavily for love. We have Martin to thank for having the moral courage—yes, an old-fashioned but rare virtue—to tell it to us plain.” —Lee K. Abbott, author of Living After Midnight A Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and Book-of-the-Month Club Lee Martin is the award-winning author of the novel Quakertown ; the memoirs From Our House , which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection in 2000, and Turning Bones ; and the short story collection The Least You Need to Know . 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 teaches in the creative writing program at The Ohio State University. Mr. Dees On the night it happened—July 5—the sun didn't set until 8:33. I went back later and checked the weather cartoon on the Evening Register's front page: a smiling face on a fiercely bright sun. I checked because it was the heart of summer, and I cou