With similar impulsiveness, Sam shows up at his father's doorstep, the first time they've seen each other in 12 years. John Burnham Schwartz is the author of five books, including Reservation Road and The Commoner. But the passage of 12 years allows him to skew perspectives and shift points of view to reveal, even more penetratingly, how that single, terrible incident from long ago still hangs over the Arno and Learner families and has made them more distant, fractured and scattered - just as a new, perspective-altering event emerges that may bring them all back together.

Those worlds are so self-contained, novel by novel, that it seems a surprise for Schwartz to return, in his new novel Northwest Corner, to the same cast of players from Reservation Road. There comes a time when you just let go the ghost of the better person you might have been.' With vivid prose and boundless empathy, Schwartz digs deep into the psyches of his all-too-flawed characters, whether they are struggling to define true love ( Claire Marvel), grappling with the constraints of Japanese monarchy ( The Commoner) or, as in Reservation Road, caught in a spiral of guilt, grief and revenge stemming from a car accident that kills a 10-year-old boy on a deserted Connecticut road. What best characterizes a John Burnham Schwartz novel is a quote from Reservation Road, the 1998 novel that made his reputation (and was made into a far lesser film): 'There are heroes, and there are the rest of us. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Northwest Corner Subtitle A Novel Author John Burnham Schwartz

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