Title: Northwest Corner
Author: John Burnham Schwartz
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: July 26, 2011
Hardcover: 304 pages
ISBN: 978-1400068456
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

The New York Times Book Review called Reservation Road “a triumph,” and the novel was universally acclaimed. Now, in a brilliant literary performance by one of our most compelling and compassionate writers, John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road’s unforgettable characters in a superb new work of fiction that stands magnificently on its own. Northwest Corner is a riveting story about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges.

Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he’s hidden.

Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam’s sense of guilt is as crushing as his father’s. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.

Told in the resonant voices of everyday people gripped in the emotional riptide of lived life, Northwest Corner is at once tough and heart-lifting, an urgent, powerful story about family bonds that can never be broken and the wayward roads that lead us back to those we love.

My Review:

Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz is a brilliantly crafted novel about families and their ability to survive in spite of adversity and challenges.  The characters are developed in masterful fashion as Schwartz employs multiple, alternating points of view to learn how Dwight Arno, a fifty-year-old man who just finished prison time after forever altering the lives of the Lerner family, and is beginning life anew with a girlfriend and new job.  A tale about secrets, truth, love, and redemption, Dwight, after facing his own mistakes now must deal with his estranged son’s own transgressions.  Readers are brought through the heartaches that still plague the Lerners, the sense of emptiness from their own loss, while also bearing witness to the psychological turmoil that the Arno family is striving to endure.  Schwartz, in a deliberate and beautiful style, captivates the reader’s attention with suspense and empathy for each of these flawed and damaged characters and while Northwest Corner follows on from Schwartz’s novel Reservation Road where his characters first come to life, his latest work is perfect as a stand alone novel.  With so many familial emotions and experiences in the Arno and Lerner families, there exists an abundance of topics for book discussion groups and I highly recommend Northwest Corner to all readers.

For more information about author John Burnham Schwartz or his books please visit his website at www.johnburnhamschwartz.com

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC Book Tour.

I received an arc of Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.