Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

RED LIGHT RUN

Baird Harper

Linked Stories

A fatal drunk driving accident in the suburbs of Chicago sets in place a series of events that echo through the lives of those close to both the victim and the perpetrator in this radiant novel-in-stories debut from a prize-winning short story writer.

When Sonia, the prominent wife of a local cemetery owner, is killed in the worst accident anyone can remember, Hartley Nolan, a lifelong teetotaler, is hardly the person police expect to find behind the wheel. After all, Hartley's something of an inspiration in a town that hasn't seen much luck in decades, the local boy who made it big in Chicago as a commodities trader without ever forgetting his struggling family back home.But Tower Hill, Illinois, close knit and alive with old rivalries, is fertile ground for resentments. With Hartley up for parole four years after his arrest, an old friend of Sonia's takes justice into his own hands.

Set in the days leading up to Sonia's death and those surrounding Hartley's release from prison, Baird Harper's linked stories reveal the perspectives of townspeople harboring wildly different knowledge about the same events. Dazzlingly told and teeming with stunning twists, Red Light Run brilliantly unravels the mystery behind the town's most notorious crime and examines how far its residents will go to rectify it.

Baird Harper's fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, and The Chicago Tribune, among other publications, and has been anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest, 2015; 40 Years of CutBank, Stories; and twice in Best New American Voices. The recipient of the 2014 Raymond Carver Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and the James Jones Short Story Award, Harper lives in Oak Park with his wife and two kids, and he teaches creative writing at Loyola University and the University of Chicago. RED LIGHT RUN is his first novel.

Available products
Book Published 2017-08-01 by Scribner

Comments

In Red Light Run Baird Harper's passionate and recalcitrant characters struggle both to remember and to forget the events surrounding a fatal accident in a small town. His stories conjure a world half-known and half-understood in which there are no easy answers to the questions of guilt, blame and forgiveness. This is a dazzling and absorbing collection. -- Margot Livesey

Harper's true success is in writing flawed characters through spare prose and setting. This is a surprising crowd-pleaser that will appeal to fans of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply and Nickolas Butler's Shotgun Lovesongs as well as to literary book clubs, which will find much to discuss.

A serial killer, car wrecks, suicide, alcoholismeveryday life in a prairie town gets dark in this debut set of linked stories. [Harper's] accessed a plainspoken but effectively moody prose style that gets into the details of each character's life...A somber but consistently intriguing clutch of heartland tales.

Harper, an acclaimed writer of short-fiction and winner of the Nelson Algren Prize, employs a wide range of narrative voices in telling the stories of those touched by the tragedy While navigating sadness, broken relationships, and swarming insects, Harper's wry humanity shines brightly in the stories of this dazzling collection.

With its impressive range of narrative voices and fully imagined lives of yearning, sometimes desperate characters, this collection marks the arrival of a promising new voice in literary fiction.

Baird Harper's clean, mordant prose makes this cubist thriller a rush to read and assemble. The tragic death at its heart is so appallingly sad, yet feels so inevitable, we know we're in the hands of a master. -- James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street

France: Grasset