The Bright Forever: A Novel [Paperback]

Lee Martin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2006

On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books.

This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a suspenseful, deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Keeping fact, speculation, and contradiction playing off one another as the details unfold, author Lee Martin creates a fast-paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. His beautiful, clear-eyed prose builds to an extremely nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss.

Reminiscent of books such as The Little Friend and The Lovely Bones, but most memorable for its own perceptions and power, The Bright Forever is a compelling and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truth.

A Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and Book-of-the-Month Club

Also available as a Books on Tape AudioBook and an eBook

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The halting, harrowing narrative of Martin's second novel (after 2001's Quakertown) draws upon multiple voices to piece together a tragedy with its own slippery backstory. On a summer evening in an "itty-bitty" Indiana town in the 1970s, nine-year-old Katie Mackey rides her bicycle to the library and never comes home. Her father, Junior Mackey, owns the town's glassworks, and to the town's residents the Mackeys are like the Kennedys, envied for their looks, their wealth and their picture-perfect life. Peeling back the layers of his characters, Martin slips easily into their darker, secret lives—lives that may harbor clues to Katie's disappearance: Henry Dees, the reclusive math tutor who sometimes lurks in the Mackeys' house; Clare Mains, the widow shunned for remarrying out of loneliness; her galling husband, Raymond R., whose drug binges and blackouts occupy stretches of unaccounted-for time; Katie's parents, freshly tortured by their own tarnished past; and Katie's brother, 17-year-old Gilley, who seizes the chance to gain his father's approval by avenging Katie's death. Rich details and raw emotion mix as Martin, in engaging the human desire to excavate the truth, underscores its complex, elusive nature. Agent, Phyllis Wender. (May) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Thirty years after the fact, a schoolteacher in a small Indiana town narrates this gripping tale of a crime and the lives it has forever changed. On a quiet evening in July, nine-year-old Katie Mackey leaves home for the library, and never returns. In chapters written in different voices and jumping back and forth between that day and four days later, the author carefully lays out his simple yet mesmerizing plot, gradually revealing the dark secrets held by those involved--secrets that, when woven together, propel the action to its seemingly preordained conclusion. The teacher, Henry Dees, is a lonely misfit who longs for a child of his own. His neighbor hides a drug addiction even from his wife, and his discovery of Henry's secret longings gives him a sense of power. This lethal combination leads to a horrendous crime that leaves Henry wracked with guilt, knowing he'll "always be living that summer in that town." Martin's novel is hard to put down, as these dark and intertwined lives march inexorably to tragedy. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; First Edition edition (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307209865
• ISBN-13: 978-0307209863
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #593,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lee Martin is the author of the novels, The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven; Quakertown; and the forthcoming Break the Skin. He has also published two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones, and another memoir, Such a Life, is set to appear in 2012. His first book was the short story collection, The Least You Need To Know. He is the co-editor of Passing the Word: Writers on Their Mentors. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper's, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where he was the winner of the 2006 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A page-turner that breaks the heart, June 20, 2005

By 

Mary L. Tabor (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bright Forever: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Bright Forever is one of those rare page-turners with a wise underbelly. Its suspense operates on two levels: It is, very simply, a "who dunnit" that even when you're sure you know, you can't stop reading. That's because Martin is doing something else: To the reader's surprise when the book is closed, he's left a question mark that haunts, that won't easily be answered, that this reader couldn't stop thinking about. Yes, we want to know who took nine-year-old Katie, whether she'll be found and what will be done about the evil that lies herein. Herein is small-town America, herein is a highly specific itty bitty town in Indiana and herein is the human heart at its best and worst. We get the story from four narrators: Mr. Dees, Katie's tutor; Gilley, Katie's older brother; Clare, Mr. Dees' neighbor and wife of handyman Raymond; and a wise omniscient narrator who holds their stories together and who, at the end of this fine novel, joins us in our search and gives us a day-by-day accounting. The way this novel breaks the heart is the biggest surprise because Martin plumbs the depths of our humanity by humanizing the worst in us all. How he does this not only amazes, it breaks the heart and recalls the work of Nabokov in that still startling novel Lolita. But Martin makes us look at ourselves even harder than the masterful Nabokov did in that memorable book.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine line between fiction and reality, February 9, 2006

By 

lisatheratgirl "lisatheratgirl" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Bright Forever: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book is dark. It involves the abduction of a nine year old girl from a small Indiana town in the summer of 1971. Unfortunately, this story happens all the time in real life and I wouldnt doubt it was based on one or more true stories. It was totally believable. There are two men in the town with dirty secrets. One has a thing for children. The other is addicted to drugs. They are next door neighbors and use and blackmail each other. The story builds like a jigsaw puzzle, a piece at a time. Each time you think you know what really happened, there's something else. The author examines the guilt of all the characters, raising complex issues of morality. You do find out what really happened, as well. There is "closure" on that matter, which sadly is often lacking for families that actually go through an experience like this. I think it's definitely worth reading, although some may find the story upsetting. I'd be interested in this author's other books.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A dark exploration of human character, May 15, 2006

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Gregory Baird (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bright Forever: A Novel (Paperback)

Is "The Bright Forever," a Pulitzer Prize finalist by Lee Martin, the most original work out there? Absolutely not; Martin clearly owes a debt to Alice Sebold's "Lovely Bones" and to last years "Case Histories," and the novel does suffer a little from a sense of been-there, read-that. But the good news is that Martin is an intelligent, perceptive, and capable writer, so he manages to craft a story that succeeds on its own right in territory that others have tread before. For starters, Martin imbues his characterizations with amazing psychological acuity -- he puts you into the head of several different characters in the narrative form to effects that range from devastating to enlightening. The characters who do not narrate the story are equally deep and affecting: you feel heartbroken by the innocence and typical-9-year-old naivete of the doomed Katie Mackey, burned by the anguish of Katie's social-climbing parents, and intrigued by the tangled web of resentment and despair that makes up Raymond R. Wright. The way the characters interact with each other and react to their surroundings pulls you through to the conclusion with an effortless ease that contradicts the novel's disquieting premise. Martin also has a keen eye for setting, and by the fourth page he has you completely grounded in small-town America and what it means to live in the "flyover zone" of the American landscape. The plot is impeccably structured to its back-and-forth flashbacks that have you on the day of Katie's disappearance in one chapter, four days later the next, and in between pausing for commentary from the narrators who are recalling what happened thirty years later. "The Bright Forever" would be a great selection for a book club, because it leaves you with a lot of questions that would make for a great group discussion (accordingly, the novel has a reading guide at the end for further contemplation). Martin's effortless writing skill makes for a fine reading experience where his novel could have coasted on its familiarity.