Sleep Toard Heaven: A Novel [Paperback]

Amanda Eyre Ward's debut novel is an intimate portrait of three women whose lives collide during a brutal Texas summer.

In Gatestown, Texas, twenty-nine-year-old Karen Lowens awaits her execution with a host of convicted serial killers on death row. In Manhattan, Dr. Franny Wren, also twenty-nine, tends to a young cancer patient, and resists the urge to run from her fiancé and her carefully crafted life. In Austin, Texas, brassy Celia Mills, a once-vibrant librarian, mourns her murdered husband.

Over the course of the summer, fate pushes these eerily recognizable women together, culminating in a revelation of the possibility of faith, the responsibility of friendship, and the value of life.Sleep Toward Heavenis a luminous story of murder and desire, solitude and grace -- a rare literary page-turner where redemption seems perpetually within arm's reach.

Darkly humorous...Wards astonishing debut blends pathos and suspense into the rarest of fictional breeds-a literary page-turner.Surprisingly sympathetic&smartly rendered. Nothing about Sleep Toward Heaven reads like a first novel. Sophisticated&unerring&. [Ward] gives us vivid, often jarring images of life in and about womens death row. Remarkable and surprising....Like a Rorschach test, Sleep Toward Heaven...prompt[s] readers to look into their own minds and hearts.The grace with which Ward writes... comples the reader to turn every page....