Sleep Toward Heaven
By Amanda Eyre Ward
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780060582296, 304pp.)
Publication Date: January 30, 2004
Categories: General
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Amanda Eyre Ward's debut novel is an intimate portrait of three women whose lives collide during a brutal Texas summer.
In Gatestown, Texas, twenty-nine-year-old Karen Lowens awaits her execution with a host of convicted serial killers on death row. In Manhattan, Dr. Franny Wren, also twenty-nine, tends to a young cancer patient, and resists the urge to run from her fiancé and her carefully crafted life. In Austin, Texas, brassy Celia Mills, a once-vibrant librarian, mourns her murdered husband.
Over the course of the summer, fate pushes these eerily recognizable women together, culminating in a revelation of the possibility of faith, the responsibility of friendship, and the value of life. Sleep Toward Heaven is a luminous story of murder and desire, solitude and grace -- a rare literary page-turner where redemption seems perpetually within arm's reach.
Amanda Eyre Ward was born in New York City and graduated from Williams College and the University of Montana. Her short stories have been published in Story Quarterly, Mississippi Review, New Delta Review, Salon.com, and Austin Chronicle. Ward is a regular contributor to the Austin Chronicle. This is her first novel.
"Darkly humorous...Ward's astonishing debut blends pathos and suspense into the rarest of fictional breeds-a literary page-turner."
-BookPage
"Like a Rorschach test, Sleep Toward Heaven...prompt[s] readers to look into their own minds and hearts."
-Charlotte Observer
"The grace with which Ward writes... comples the reader to turn every page...."
-Omaha Pulp
"[Ward] gives us vivid, often jarring images of life in and about women's death row. Remarkable and surprising...."
-Texas Observer
"Surprisingly sympathetic.smartly rendered. Nothing about Sleep Toward Heaven reads like a first novel. Sophisticated.unerring.. "
-Texas Monthly
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