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A Novel
by Lou Berney
With the compelling narrative tension and psychological complexity of the works of Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson, and Michael Connelly, Edgar Award-nominee Lou Berney's The Long and Faraway Gone is a smart, fiercely compassionate crime story that explores the mysteries of memory and the impact of violence on survivors - and the lengths they will go to find the painful truth of the events that scarred their lives.
In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved.
Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors' lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt's latest inquiry takes him back to a past he's tried to escape - and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead.
Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past - with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she'll stop at nothing to find answers.
As Wyatt's case becomes more complicated and dangerous, and Julianna seeks answers from a ghost, their obsessive quests not only stir memories of youth and first love, but also begin to illuminate dark secrets of the past. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free - or ultimately destroy them?
Edgar Awards, 2016
WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD, THE MACAVITY AWARD, THE ANTHONY AWARD, AND THE BARRY AWARD FOR BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
NOMINATED FOR THE 2015 LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE
"Starred Review. Berney's novel is most truly a thoughtful exploration of memory and what it means to be a survivor. Elegiac and wistful, it is a lyrical mystery ... with a deep, wounded heart. Read it." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Focused, very insightfully, on love, loss, and memory ... fully realized creations that readers won't soon forget. A genuinely memorable novel of ideas." - Booklist
"Starred Review. Will raise a lump in the throat ... the leads' struggles are portrayed with painful complexity, and Berney, fittingly, avoids easy answers." - Publishers Weekly
"The two key players in Lou Berney's superb regional mystery suffer from separate but equally crushing cases of survivor guilt ... Berney tells both their stories with supreme sensitivity, exploring the ‘landscape of memory' that keeps shifting beneath our feet." - Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
"The Long and Faraway Gone is that rare literary gem -- a dark, quintessentially cool noir novel that is both deeply poignant, and very funny ... as hip, hilarious, and entertaining as it is wrenching, beautiful, and ultimately redemptive." - Huffington Post
"A tour de force built around two tragedies ripped from the headlines of this newspaper ... should top the bestseller lists in our local bookstores, but is deserving of national acclaim." - Oklahoma City Oklahoman
"This is crime fiction at its absolute best ... deeply insightful and beautifully written ... squarely in the ranks of powerhouses such as Lippman and Lehane." - Crimespree Magazine
This information about The Long and Faraway Gone was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lou Berney is the author of November Road, The Long and Faraway Gone (winner of the Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Macavity, and ALA awards), Whiplash River, and Gutshot Straight. He's also written a collection of stories, The Road to Bobby Joe, and his short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and teaches in the MFA program at Oklahoma City University..
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