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    This Bright River: A Novel
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    This Bright River: A Novel
    Unavailable
    This Bright River: A Novel
    Audiobook14 hours

    This Bright River: A Novel

    Written by Patrick Somerville

    Narrated by David W. Collins

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook


    From a writer and producer of HBO's acclaimed apocalyptic drama series The Leftovers, comes a compelling story of young love and old secrets.

    Ben Hanson's aimless life has bottomed out after a series of bad decisions, but an unexpected offer from his father draws him home to Wisconsin. There, he finds his family fractured, still reeling from his cousin's mysterious death a decade earlier.

    Lauren Sheehan abandoned her career in medicine after a series of violent events abroad. Now she's back in the safest place she knows -- the same small Wisconsin town where she and Ben grew up -- hiding from a world that has only brought her heartache.

    As Lauren cautiously expands her horizons and Ben tries to unravel his family's dark secrets, their paths intersect. Could each be exactly what the other needs?

    A compelling family drama and a surprising love story, This Bright River is the work of a natural storyteller, one whose dark humor and piercing intelligence provide constant, lasting delights.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateJun 26, 2012
    ISBN9781611134575
    Unavailable
    This Bright River: A Novel

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    Reviews for This Bright River

    3.5/5

    25 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Mystery set in St. Helen's, WI, a small town near Madison. Main characters include Ben - ex-con -, his successful parents & sister, her father's brother, Denny, & his son Wayne, Lauren - became a dr & traveled the world, married Will, left Will - who is a nut case. Lots of twists & turns - last 1/4 of book was the most exciting/interesting.
    • 5/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Sometimes I'm very glad that I've never met Chicago author Patrick Somerville, because it lets me do full critical reviews of his work without the taint of a personal bias; and that's especially welcome in the case of his newest novel, This Bright River, because it's a stunner that turned out to be one of my favorite reads of the entire year. Essentially Somerville's attempt at a Jonathan Franzen novel (or at least the first two thirds, but more on that in a bit), it tells what at first is a meandering dysfunctional-family story, about a disgraced trust-fund twentysomething who has been tasked by his rich Chicago parents to clean up a recently deceased uncle's home in the small Wisconsin town where they all grew up; and for the majority of the book this story unfolds in a highly competent if not expected way, as we get a more and more detailed look at the recent events that have made this man-child and minimum-security convict have the life he now leads, as he awkwardly reconnects with a former high-school acquaintance who is also back in their hometown as a means of running away from some sort of bad incident in her own recent past.Ah, but then we enter the extended third act of this novel, which is where everything changes; because without giving away any plot points, it becomes clear that the incidents from the woman's recent past are both a lot more dangerous than anything else we've been looking at so far in these characters' lives, and an ongoing problem that hasn't yet been resolved*, turning This Bright River into a legitimate action thriller for its last hundred pages, a delightful thing to see after thinking that this was to be yet another character-heavy look at messed up Midwestern families. Now combine this with a growing sense of mystery about the unexplained death of this recently deceased uncle's son a decade ago, which seems in the first half to be merely a clever literary detail by Somerville but which blossoms into a main hinge of the plot by the end; and what you're left with is not just the usual academic tale of dysfunctional families but a deeply moving and thematically complex look at the black secrets all of us carry around in our lives, no matter who we are or how normal our lives seem to outsiders, a story that will have you not only thinking for days afterward but literally tearing through pages by the end, from the sheer sense of beach-read adventure that Somerville bakes into what is otherwise a pretty typical MFAer plot. A book that will easily earn a spot on our best-of-the-year lists coming in just another few weeks, this is a triumphant achievement for Somerville as an artist, especially after two previous books that I found only so-so; and if you haven't read this haunting novel for yourself yet, I urge you to pick up a copy soon.Out of 10: 9.7*SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! I usually try to avoid mentioning any important plot details in my book reviews, but I just had to make a special note in this case, and say how incredibly impressed I was by Somerville's treatment of the sexually violent sickness that guides our villain's actions in the climax of This Bright River, and especially how this villain has managed to get away with these acts of violence for decades now because he has literally only committed these acts four times in his life, a truly ill individual who acknowledges his sickness and spends years between each episode trying to control it. Although the literal plot details in this part are similar to how a supermarket thriller might play out, I love how much reality and nuance Somerville brings to the motivations that guide these actions (versus the cackling serial killer most such novels portray their sexually violent villains as), making the story that much more chilling by showing us that this villain could literally be any of a dozen people all of us know in our own real lives. Kudos to the author for delivering one of the best character developments I've read in years.
    • 3/5
      Not as fanciful as The Cradle - in fact not fanciful at all - pretty dark with miseries coming from both sides of a relationship that may or may not work out. But great characters. Could have used about 100 less pages and one less plot line. The men are vivid but the women are ciphers. Worth the read if you are patient.
    • 3/5
      Not sure what to say about this one. Didn't love it, didn't hate it. It read well enough - I finished it in two days, but I felt like the book was having an identity crisis - it didn't know whether it wanted to be a character study, a mystery, a psychological thriller, or a literary fiction book. It just seemed disjointed.
    • 5/5
      I eagerly anticipated this novel because I thoroughly enjoyed The Cradle. This novel is very different, though, and a much more ambitious work. The Cradle told its story in a straightforward fashion as a husband is sent out on a mission by his pregnant wife to find an ancient cradle her mother had when she was a child - and in that quest he discovers something much more vitally important to her. The story in This Bright River unfolds in a far less linear pattern. Two characters, Ben and Lauren, who knew each other in high school, return to their Wisconsin hometown in their 30s after each of them has suffered significant setbacks. But we don't get their backstory in a straightforward manner. We're given small details along the way, as the present story of their re-discovery of each other keeps circling back with revelations of partial details of their past - he ended up in prison after he exacted revenge against a friend and former business partner by burning the man's apartment down because the friend had stolen his girlfriend. She, after serving as a doctor in Africa, ran away from her husband, and is now deeply wounded and depressed from the turmoil of that relationship. Another key element of the story is the death of Ben's cousin, Wayne, who froze in the woods of his father's remote cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The novel progresses in even more than a circling pattern because, as the details build-up, the back stories also go down meandering paths, the relevance of which aren't apparent until the novel starts to bring all the pieces together near the end of the book. But even then the pieces aren't perfectly reunited because that's part of the books theme - that you can't ever discover the full meaning or hidden "truth" of events from the past. There's a moment of high suspense about three-quarters of the way in when Ben and Lauren's haunted pasts converge, but then even deeper family secrets are revealed as the novel returns to its moving contemplation of what dredging up the past means and whether it's ever possible to have any of it make enough sense to help you move forward. In the early pages, the novel requires a bit of patience as you get partial mysterious details about the characters, but it richly pays off if you stick with it.