This Glittering World
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
T. Greenwood, acclaimed author of Two Rivers and The Hungry Season, crafts a moving, lyrical story of loss, atonement, and promises kept.
One November morning, Ben Bailey walks out of his Flagstaff, Arizona, home to retrieve the paper. Instead, he finds Ricky Begay, a young Navajo man, beaten and dying in the newly fallen snow.
Unable to forget the incident, especially once he meets Ricky's sister, Shadi, Ben begins to question everything, from his job as a part-time history professor to his fiancée, Sara. When Ben first met Sara, he was mesmerized by her optimism and easy confidence. These days, their relationship only reinforces a loneliness that stretches back to his fractured childhood.
Ben decides to discover the truth about Ricky's death, both for Shadi's sake and in hopes of filling in the cracks in his own life. Yet the answers leave him torn--between responsibility and happiness, between his once-certain future and the choices that could liberate him from a delicate web of lies he has spun.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A lackluster guy finds purpose in the pursuit of justice in Greenwood's slack latest (after The Hungry Season). When Ben Bailey, an adjunct history professor and part-time bartender mildly dissatisfied with his life and engagement to occasionally shrewish Sara, finds the badly beaten body of a young Native American on his lawn, he's driven to find out what happened. His quest takes on a new dimension once the young man dies and his death goes all but unnoticed. Ben soon meets the victim's sister, Shadi, and falls for her while they investigate her brother's murder, but by the time he tries to call off his engagement, Sara is pregnant and Ben is torn between the life that's being planned for him and the more adventurous one that he thinks he wants. Greenwood's Flagstaff, Ariz., is a convincing one, more so than the forced premise of Ben's sorrow binding him to Shadi, and while the plot manages a few surprises, Ben's too passive for a man on a mission.
