The Long and Faraway Gone

by Lou Berney

WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD, THE MACAVITY AWARD, THE ANTHONY AWARD, AND THE BARRY AWARD FOR BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL NOMINATED FOR THE 2015 LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE With the compelling narrative tension and psychological complexity of the works of Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson, and Michael Connelly, Edgar Award-nominee Lou Berney's The Long and Faraway Gone is a smart, fiercely compassionate crime story that explores the mysteries of memory and the impact of violence on survivors-and the lengths they will go to find the painful truth of the events that scarred their lives. In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved. Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors' lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt's latest inquiry takes him back to a past he's tried to escape-and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead.
Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past-with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she'll stop at nothing to find answers. As Wyatt's case becomes more complicated and dangerous, and Julianna seeks answers from a ghost, their obsessive quests not only stir memories of youth and first love, but also begin to illuminate dark secrets of the past. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free-or ultimately destroy them?

• ISBN10: 0062292447
• ISBN13: 9780062292445
• Publish Date: 10 February 2015
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Collins
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 464
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

This is my book of the year. I’ve tried half a dozen different times to write out the reason why, and I may have to stop trying. I’ll just say: it’s been the right book at the right time. I don’t think I’ve stopped reading it since I got my hands on it. A year ago, something happened to me and my friends that is eerily similar to the opening chapter— obviously with a much better outcome. But my year took a shift, one I had to accommodate, into a world that I had to learn, and re-learn, and am still learning what’s the same and what’s different.

And this book has something for me. Oklahoma City in 1986 and 2012 is what I needed in 2015. It speaks my language. It doesn’t give up answers easy. And when it does give up answers— more than I expected— they’re the right kind of answers.

I don’t think a book has affected me more in 2015. I know I haven’t needed one more. I’d say it tore me up, but really, it’s helped a little bit to put me back together.