BROKEN RIVER

A modest house in upstate New York. It's one in the morning. Three people—a couple and their child—hurry out the door, but it's too late for them. As the virtuosic and terrifying opening scene of J. Robert Lennon's latest novel unfolds, a spectral presence seems to be watching with cold and mysterious interest. Soon the house lies abandoned, and years later a new family moves in.

Karl, Eleanor, and their daughter Irina arrive from New York City in the wake of Karl's infidelity to create a new life for themselves. Karl tries to stabilize his flailing career as a sculptor. Eleanor, a successful commercial novelist, eagerly pivots in a new creative direction. Meanwhile, twelve year-old Irina becomes obsessed with the brutal murders that occurred in the house years before. And, secretly, so does her mother. As the ensemble cast grows to include Louis, a hapless salesman in a carpet warehouse who is haunted by his past, and Sam, a young woman newly reunited with her jailbird brother, the seemingly unrelated crime that opened the story becomes ominously and relentlessly relevant. Hovering over all this activity looms The Observer, a gradually awakening narrative consciousness that watches these characters conceal secrets from others and from themselves.

BROKEN RIVER is a cinematic, darkly comic, and completely sui generis psychological thriller that could only have been written by J. Robert Lennon.

J. Robert Lennon is the author of seven novels, including Familiar, Castle, and Mailman, and a story collection, Pieces for the Left Hand. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Harper's Magazine, Playboy, and The New Yorker.