In the River Sweet: A Novel - Hardcover

“With a poet's eye for the essential and a novelist's sweeping vision across space and time, Patricia Henley illuminates here the wounds and yearnings of us all–the inherent destructive power of long-held secrets, the never-ending search for spiritual wholeness, our deluded belief that a lasting state of grace is always just out of reach. Gorgeously written and suffused with wisdom, In the River Sweet is an absolutely superb novel from one of our very best!”
–Andre Dubus III

“In her remarkable new novel, In the River Sweet, Patricia Henley has drawn directly on the events of the Vietnam War and its aftermath and yet given them the universal resonance of high art. And she's done so within a compellingly readable story. For those seeking to consider Vietnam beyond the parochialism of politics, this book is essential reading.”
–Robert Olen Butler

“With their secrets, bad choices, mistakes, and simple stubborn endurance, Patricia Henley's people are as close to me as my own. Like family, they resonate. Like the best of us, they endure and even occasionally triumph.
“In the River Sweet gives us a close look at the intimate damage within an all-too-normal American family. By the time I closed the book, I was nodding my head and getting ready to call a few friends: this is what it feels like, this is how we live, and endure, and yes, damn it, go on when we think we cannot.
“I'd swim a river to read any novel Patrica Henley writes. For this one, I'd swim an ocean.”
–Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“Patricia Henley has gifts aplenty to vividly bring to life Saigon during the Vietnam War, a Catholic girl's upbringing in America, and the rich history of a marriage, one that must undergo a transformation to survive. She expertly weaves the threads of her characters' past and present, at home and abroad, into the compelling whole of In the River Sweet.”
–Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World and The Book of Ruth

Patricia Henley’s first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and The New Yorker Best Fiction Book Award. Henley has also written two books of poetry, Learning to Die and Back Roads, and three story collections: Friday Night at Silver Star, which won the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award; The Secret of Cartwheels; and Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and Northwest Review, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize anthology. Henley lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she teaches in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Purdue University.
From the Trade Paperback edition.