In the river sweet Book

From the author of the National Book Award finalist Hummingbird House comes an emotionally enthralling novel about an Indiana family swept up in the rapids of history - both the social and spiritual upheavals of present-day America and the bitter legacy of the war in Vietnam. At mid-life, Ruth Anne Bond is still passionately in love with her husband, Johnny, deeply involved in her church, and close to her daughter, Laurel. But one day she receieves a message that threatens the foundations of her marriage - a message she has craved and dreaded for thirty years: Dear Mrs. Ruth Anne, I believe you are my mother. What emerges is a secret dating back to 1968, when nineteen-year-old Ruth Anne was a volunteer in a French convent in Saigon and where, at Tet, the celebratory pop of firecrackers gave way to the sound of gunfire. As Ruth Anne struggles to come to terms with her past - and Johnny grapples with his own memories of the war - Patricia Henly crafts a sensitive and beautifully written meditation on family and faith, and what it means to be moral in a world of conflicting moral codes. Filled with intensely believable characters and the sensual presence of Saigon, New Orleans, and small-town America, In the River Sweet establishes its author as one of our most fearlessly ambitious novelists.