Sleep Toward Heaven

by Amanda Eyre Ward Narrated by Carol Monda, Susan Bennett

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

How do we forgive the unforgivable? First-time novelist Ward explores this question with a delicate blend of compassion, humor and realism. Three women whose lives converge during a stifling Texas summer have followed completely different paths in their 29 years. The horrendous childhood of death row inmate Karen Lowens led her to prostitution, drug abuse and finally murder. She now longs to find peace before her scheduled execution in the Gatestown, Tex., prison. She resists friendship, as "any connection, any tiny strand, will bind her to this world" from which she so wants to be freed. Franny Wren, Karen's prison doctor, is just as afraid to befriend Karen, knowing that she can't save her. She is fragile, having recently run out on her fiance and her life in New York City after the death of one of her cancer patients, a young girl, left her guilt-ridden and emotionally drained. Franny has returned to her childhood home in Gatestown, where she was raised by an uncle after her parents were killed by a drunk driver. Meanwhile, in Austin, Celia Mills, the only first-person narrator of the three, is the widow of Karen's final victim. She has been sleepwalking through life since the murder, and her stabs at joining the living are touching and funny ("Although my mother disagrees, I have moved forward with my life. For example, I've bought a new bikini"). Ward's celebration of human resilience never becomes preachy, sentimental or politically heavy-handed. Her spare but psychologically rich portraits are utterly convincing. (Mar. 19) Forecast: Ward's portrait of life on death row and the questions she raises about the death penalty are especially timely; expect healthy sales. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The lives of three women orbit a murder and the pending execution—in a debut effort that straddles literary and crime fiction. Chapters alternate among the three. Karen is the murderer, stuck on death row, 62 days from her date with death, but serving as a kind of counselor to other women who find themselves in Texas’s penal system. When a new inmate, Satan Killer (a.k.a. Sharleen), arrives, "Karen thinks about things to say to Sharleen. She wants to tell her that she is not alone in knowing what it feels like to tear through human life." Franny is a doctor on the spiritual outs, and as soon as she gets out of her engagement, she’ll be headed to new work at the prison, where she’ll encounter Karen. Celia, meanwhile, the wife of the man Karen murdered, is pondering how to deal with her loss ("Although my mother disagrees, I have moved forward with my life. For example, I’ve bought a new bikini"), and her grief takes the form of promiscuity. Winding up in a brief fling with a twentysomething wannabe novelist, she imagines she will make a great short story someday. Newcomer Ward hasn’t yet quite figured out how to blend the faceless prose of crime writing with the more literary impulse that she seems capable of. But the three women feel too much alike: Celia not quite sad enough, Franny remarkably composed as she realigns her life, and Karen, who will die either of HIV or a lethal injection—whichever comes first—is so normal it’s hard to imagine her shooting cashiers in the back and watching them die. Ward wants to write about lives changing but is stuck in a plot that must buckle when Celia finally, days before the execution, goes to see Karen and ask how her husband died.How could the peace they achieve not feel contrived? A worthy first effort from a writer still developing. Agent: Michelle Tesler/Carlisle & Co.

Omaha Pulp

The grace with which Ward writes... comples the reader to turn every page....

Charlotte Observer

Like a Rorschach test, Sleep Toward Heaven...prompt[s] readers to look into their own minds and hearts.

Texas Observer

[Ward] gives us vivid, often jarring images of life in and about women’s death row. Remarkable and surprising....

Texas Monthly

Surprisingly sympathetic…smartly rendered. Nothing about Sleep Toward Heaven reads like a first novel. Sophisticated…unerring…. “

BookPage

Darkly humorous...Ward’s astonishing debut blends pathos and suspense into the rarest of fictional breeds-a literary page-turner.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171138295
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	06/24/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Sleep Toward Heaven
A Novel

Chapter One

Karen

On Wednesday, they begin to get ready for the Satan Killer, who is due to arrive after lunch. They order a lamp and a radio from the commissary, and charge them to Tiffany's account. Karen makes the bed in the empty cell with clean sheets. All the women on Death Row, who had been using the cell as a storage room, have removed their belongings to give the Satan Killer a fresh start.

Lifting the sheet in the air and snapping it tight over the mattress, Karen remembers the pure relief that flooded through her when she first saw her own cell: bare, clean, and smelling of ammonia. It was almost five years ago.

Tiffany takes two books from the bookshelf, Women Who Kill and The Jane Fonda Workout. She puts them by the Satan Killer's bed. "There," she says.

It is four-thirty in the morning. Breakfast is over, and there is the long, pre-lunch stretch ahead of them. Tiffany stands outside the vacant cell, one thin arm around her stomach and the other against her chin. "Should I, like, draw her a picture or something? It looks so sad."

"Leave it alone," says Karen.

"But it looks pathetic," says Tiffany. She shakes her Farrah Fawcett hairdo, and it settles back into place. Underneath her white jumpsuit, her limbs are strong. Tiffany runs in place and does sit-ups and push-ups inside her cell. She takes recess daily, has made a dusty path the shape of the number eight in the small, fenced yard. She believes that she will be set free, and the belief makes her restless. Karen recognizes the sharp hope, like a piece of gravel in a shoe. The knowledge of time, and of missing out. When you let go of the hope, there is a dull, numb peace in its wake.

"Leave it alone," says Karen.

They live in a row, in Mountain View Unit. They share the television and the table bolted to the rectangle of cement in front of their cells. During the day, they are locked into the cage, where they work. Unlike the rest of the prisoners, they are not taught skills for the future. Instead, they make dolls called Parole Pals, which prison employees can special-order, choosing hair color, skin color, an outfit. All afternoon in the cage, the women paint faces on the Parole Pals, and make tiny clothes and shoes. Sometimes, Karen wakes in the night and sees the naked, faceless dolls that hang above the sewing machines. She has to remind herself that they are not babies, and not alive.

♦ ♦ ♦

Veronica agrees with Tiffany. She says, in her low, hoarse voice, "That cell certainly does need something. Something decorative." Veronica has been on Death Row the longest, and has a manner that commands respect, something about the way she holds her shoulders back and peppers her statements with words like "certainly," "absolutely," and "indeed." She is sixty-three years old, and wears her white hair in a bun. Her skin is loose, and she is fleshy, wide at the hips.

She rises from her cot and wraps one of her veined hands around a metal bar. Although they are no longer allowed cigarettes, Veronica has retained a smoker's way of speaking, pausing between statements, a pause that should be punctuated by a deep inhale and elegant exhale of smoke. They wait, and Veronica decrees, "Art."

"Excuse me?" says Karen.

"Art," says Veronica. "Everyone find something or make something. Some sort of art."

"Let her do it herself," says Karen. She points to Veronica's cell. "You don't want someone else's crap on your wall, you know?"

Veronica turns to look at her cell, which is filled with yellowing photographs. She has wedding pictures of herself with all her husbands: Allen, Grady, Bill, Patrick, Stephen, another Bill, Chuck. In the earliest pictures, she is small-boned, engulfed in dresses like cakes, layered and creamy. Over the years, her body grows solid and her wedding dresses become darker and more spare. Patrick is the last husband for whom she wore a veil. Veronica's face goes slack looking at the photographs. She is lost in one of her wedding days, spinning on a dance floor while the band plays "Starlight Melody" and her new husband presses his warm lips to her forehead.

Tiffany jumps in. "I wish you had put something in my cell. It was so horrible, being dragged here and dumped like a bag of garbage!" Her voice goes shrill, indignant. Tiffany insists that she is innocent, that somebody else drowned her daughters, Joanna and Josie. Somebody else took them to the pond behind Tiffany's house and put rocks in the girls' matching sleeping suits. Somebody threw them in, held them under until they drowned, and watched them sink. Their open mouths, throats filled with water. Eyes open to stinging darkness. In Tiffany's cell, she has twenty-six shades of nail polish, lined up in a gleaming row.

Karen tries not to roll her eyes. Jackie looks up from her sewing. "What about one of my quilts?" she says. "It would add some color, anyway." She brushes her hair from her freckled forehead with a quick motion, and something in her jaw snaps. Jackie is filled with mean energy. She moves fast, talks fast, has bony elbows and knees. To keep her hands moving, she sews: quilts, pillows, the dress she will be executed in. The dress is red, with sequins she orders from a catalog.

They will only let her have one dull needle, so her sewing goes pretty slowly. Although "Mountain View Quilts" seemed like a good idea for a business, Jackie has only sold one through the Web site her sister maintains. Jackie used to be a hairdresser, and likes to do everyone's hair. Obviously, she can't cut anything, but she brushes it around and sprays hairspray. Also, she does Tiffany's nails. She is due to be executed in a month ...

Sleep Toward Heaven
A Novel. Copyright © by Amanda Ward. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Videos