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    Sleep Toward Heaven
    Sleep Toward Heaven
    Sleep Toward Heaven
    Audiobook7 hours

    Sleep Toward Heaven

    Written by Amanda Eyre Ward

    Narrated by Carol Monda and Susan Bennett

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 Heaven is a luminous
    story of murder and desire, solitude and grace—a rare literary page-turner where redemption seems perpetually
    within arm’s reach.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 24, 2011
    ISBN9781461804895
    Sleep Toward Heaven
    Author

    Amanda Eyre Ward

    Amanda Eyre Ward was born in New York City, and graduated from Williams College and the University of Montana. Her short stories have been published in various literary reviews and magazines. She is the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel ‘Sleep Towards Heaven’ and ‘How to be Lost’, and was named by the New York Post as one of five Writers to Watch in 2003. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, geologist Tip Meckel.

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    Reviews for Sleep Toward Heaven

    4/5

    9 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book is kind of written like a soap opera, constantly changing betweeen 3 women's stories, but as the book progresses you can see the stories intertwine. This was a very quick and good read.
    • 5/5
      I thought this fantastic, though I see it's had mixed reviews here and elsewhere. It is perhaps a slight book in some ways, but I found that the sparsity of detail and description actually added to the story experience. The three women whose strands are interwoven were all more complex and less easy to grasp than originally anticipated - not just the convicted murderer, for whom we must assume from the outset we are going to have complicated feelings about - and the resolution, while not entirely unexpected had a nice little twist to it - several in fact - which I felt gave the characters a bit more humanity.
    • 5/5
      This book starts with a group of women on death row. The author then introduces us to two seemingly random women outside of the prison. As the story moves on, we learn how the lives of all of these women intertwine.Amanda Eyre Ward does a superb job of bringing her readers into the emotional world of those who are touched by and those who experience the death penalty. She offers no opinions but instead simply sits back and lets us experience it all through her characters' viewpoints and emotions. No matter which side of the fence you're on with the death penalty, Sleep Toward Heaven is well written, captivating, and insightful.
    • 4/5
      Writing a novel about Death Row is a tricky thing, like walking tightrope on barbed wire.Pop cult depictions of prisoners awaiting execution often have a hard time balancing pompous pulpit-pounding (as with movies like Dead Man Walking or The Life of David Gale) with the unglossed nitty-gritty (as in HBO's Oz or Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song). We're either awash in pathos or grime. And what about humor? Isn't there a place for a couple of laughs on Death Row?Amanda Eyre Ward rises to these challenges in her debut novel, Sleep Toward Heaven. Aside from a couple of minor stumbles, the story races from page one to page last at knuckle-whitening speed. She manages to walk the barbed wire without losing balance (wobbling, yes; but never falling). There's even a healthy injection of humor in the book's veins.Sleep Toward Heaven, which takes its title from a poem by William Stafford, follows three women whose lives eventually converge: Karen, a 29-year-old who's been on Texas' Death Row for five years for a string of murders; Celia, the widow of Karen's last victim; and Franny, a doctor who escapes to Texas from New York, leaving behind her fiancé, an insufferable chauvinist pig. All three women are haunted and riddled with anxiety, fretting over matters large and small as Karen's execution date draws near.For Franny, it's the decision to dump her shallow, soulless boyfriend and head down to her hometown in Texas where her uncle once volunteered as a prison doctor. For Celia, it's wondering why she's sleeping with a boy half her age whom she met in the post office while mailing a letter to her husband's killer. For that killer, Karen, of course, it's reconciling her dark past with her equally dark future ("The worst part is that everybody is going to watch me go"). We're also introduced to several other women on Death Row, each of them with distinct personalities which avoid falling into the high camp of chicks-behind-bars B movies.Ward immediately puts us inside the lives of her characters with a rapid-fire voice that keeps the action crackling along, yet is lyric enough to slow down and savor the details -- like these thoughts running through Karen's head:Things were not always like this for Karen. Her earliest memory is her happiest one. She hopes that death will bring her back to that night, with the smell of her mother's breast: a powdery, caramel smell. The warmth of her mother's hair, ironed on the kitchen table. A car horn honking, a bright moon sky. Her mother whispering a lullaby, soft vowels, papery voice.Ward also captures the sounds and smells of prison life, including details like how guards remove the sticks from corn dogs before serving them for lunch. She builds credibility at every turn of the page.And it's not just prison -- there's also authenticity in her scenes of small-town Texas life, like this description of a local café:On every wall, there were deer heads, and most of them had baseball hats stuck on their antlers. In between the deer heads were sawblades with nature scenes painted on them and large wagon wheels. Also, photographs of men in sunglasses kneeling next to dead deer. In the rare spots where it was visible, the wallpaper was striped. Ward is less successful in handling some of her minor characters, especially Franny's fiancé. The superficiality of Nat's character, and the clumsy clichés the author puts in his mouth, stand out like a sore thumb in an otherwise well-developed cast of characters. Fortunately, Nat soon exits the book, stage left, and we're allowed to concentrate fully on the lives of the Death Row women, the widow, and the doctor.One more thing: let me send up my own personal thanks to heaven that Ward didn't feel compelled to include a clock-ticking finale where everyone stands around waiting for a phone call from the governor. Her climax is suspenseful, but it goes in a different (and more satisfying) direction than the ones we're used to seeing in the movies.Ward works with a film editor's pace, snipping and cutting quickly between the three women as they each try to piece together lives shattered by violence and disappointment. The result is a novel that reads like lightning, but has the lasting roll of thunder.
    • 5/5
      This is a beautiful book about the lives of three women becoming interwoven, despite each being somewhat lost and solitary. The characters are absolutely sympathetic and believable, and the story will touch you and make you laugh at times. The plot moves quickly, and in the end this is one of those books you'll have a hard time putting down, and want desperately to pick up again. It's not short, but I was forced (by the story and characters) to read it in one sitting. I'd recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Ward's debut novel explores the lives of three struggling Texas women while at the same time probing the death penalty issue in a way that is neither overbearing nor preachy. Karen Lowens, after suffering a very unfortunate childhood, comes to know the only love in her life with Ellen, her junkie girlfriend. Karen's love and desperation for Ellen's love in return drive her to unspeakable acts that finally land Karen on death row as penalty for several counts of murder. Franny Wren, a workaholic doctor recently burned by getting too close to a dying patient, returns to Texas upon the death of her beloved uncle, a part-time prison doctor. In doing so, she flees a life and a fiance in New York City that no longer satisfy her to temporarily replace her uncle as doctor in the prison. Celia Mills, young librarian and widow of Karen's final victim, struggles through life without her husband Henry. She attempts to fill the void by writing a letter to Karen on death row in an attempt to make her husband's killer understand just what has been taken from her and then having an affair with a boy-author she meets when she goes to mail the letter.Added to the main characters are the women Karen lives with on death row. These women, while we never quite understand what drove them to their crimes, are convincing characters each dealing with their incarceration and impending deaths in their own way. Somehow Ward manages to make these characters and their interactions in their small prison both appalling and strikingly ordinary. Ward's characters are damaged and real. Karen, Franny, and Celia's stories suspensefully intertwine as Karen's August execution date approaches. Ward graces Sleep Toward Heaven with a deeply satisfying ending successfully doing justice to the rest of the story and the characters that readers will come to care about.Having read two books by Ward, it's obvious to me that Ward's greatest strength, which is very well demonstrated in Sleep Toward Heaven, is her great sense of timing. While developing her characters' current situations, she gives us a steady trickle of their histories that we find ourselves longing for as we become acquainted with them in the present. Her ability to perfectly time the "doses" of this information combined with her skill in knowing when to cut away from one character's story to another's make this novel quite literally unputdownable.
    • 3/5
      Sleep Toward HeavenDeath Row in prison - how terrifying!! How do they deal with this kind of life? What are there daily rituals? The author introduces us to 5 women who are in prison awaiting their last day on this earth. You will also hear from a widow whose husband's life was tragically killed one night. She has spent her years just going through the motions of life and hating this person who took her husband away from her. Her emotions have been on a roller coaster ride since finding out this person is finally going to die for what she has done. The week is finally here - will she be elated or sad? Forgive her?This is very emotional book that you will not able to forget. You will not regret reading it. I didn't.