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.
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"Faith, forgiveness and redemption comprise tried and true terrain in fiction. Ward delivers all three without manipulation or melodrama. She has woven a wonderful fictional tapestry with meaning embedded in the threads."—Pat MacEnulty, Sun-Sentinel
"Women's Death Row as you have never seen it; hauntingly rich, wise and sharply etched. In prison parlance: a bonaroo first novel!"—James Ellroy, author of The Cold Six Thousand and L.A. Confidential
"Sleep Toward Heaven is a merciful gaze on the lives of three women inextricably linked by murder and ultimate grace. Brutal, beautiful, wise – Amanda Eyre Ward has written a storm of a novel. It will rattle the cage of your heart."—Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red
"Sleep Toward Heaven is a riveting read, a page-turner from the get-go. In this ambitious debut novel, with cinematic scope and a probing eye, Amanda Eyre Ward takes her readers inside the criminal justice system and into the hearts and minds of three women – a death row inmate dying of AIDS, the young widow of her last victim, and the kind, troubled prison doctor – whose lives literally hang in each other's hands during a few desperately hot months of Texas summer." —Thisbe Nissen, author of Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night and The Good People of New York
"This is a terrific read, involving and surprising. Ward gives us a textured, vivid portrait of women on death row. Her writing is unflinching, sometimes hauntingly funny, always compelling."—Karen Stolz, author of Fanny and Sue and World of Pies
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.
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