Thus begins one of the most compulsively readable novels of the year: a book that reads like a thriller, but opens up a world rich with psychological nuance -- where the desire for revenge and the ache of guilt become tragically intertwined, and grief becomes "a way of living, like breathing."

For soon after the Learners begin their drive home, a terrible tragedy overtakes them. They stop at a gas station on Reservation Road; Josh, dreaming of music, and a ten-year-old's private world, is standing on the side of the dark road when a car comes careening around a bend. Josh is hit; the car slows to a halt, then speeds away.

From this moment forward, "Reservation Road" becomes a countdown to the harrowing confrontation between the driver of that car -- Dwight Arno, himself a father of a ten-year-old boy; a man half running from his crime, half wishing to pay the price for what he did -- and Ethan Learner, whose life and family will never be the same. Behind their stories is the story of Grace, which is a mother's story; a story of inconsolable loss and of conscience, as she struggles to find the strength to be the mother eight-year-old Emma so badly needs.

In a flawlessly woven narrative made up of the voices of Dwight, Ethan, and Grace, "Reservation Road" marks a return of one of the most celebrated young writers of hisgeneration in an utterly gripping novel that explores the terrain of grief even as it astonishes with unexpected redemption: terrifying and powerful and impossible to put down.