The Light Between the Pines

“Read’s novel is a quiet, deep character study of a man reckoning with his mistakes and shortcomings in a continuing effort to right his relationship with his daughter. In a novel that’s straightforward and steeped in reflections about place, Red is a fully realized character as he thinks “he understood now the expectation of silence in a place like this, among people like these. The pull between what a person should do versus what they had to do.”—Kirkus

“The Light Between the Pines broke my heart in the best possible way. Warren Read has a rare gift for lyrical, precise prose that illuminates the private griefs and stubborn hopes of a man of few words and deep, unexpressed feelings. At its core, this is a story of searching—for a missing daughter, for answers, for redemption. A beautifully written, profound meditation on parental love: what we carry, what we let go, and what, against all odds, we are given back. An extraordinary novel.”—A. J. Banner, author of After Nightfall and Dreaming of Water.

“The Light Between the Pines is one of those rare novels that understands that family mysteries are merely the stories we’ve been telling ourselves for so long that we’ve forgotten where the facts end and the longing begins. Wise, compassionate, and quietly devastating, Warren Read’s novel explores fathers and daughters, the debts we owe, the ones we can never repay, and the stubborn hope that survives even after a life has given us every reason to let it go. Set against the lonely landscapes of the American West, this is a story about loss, and the fragile bridges we spend our lives trying to build back to the people we love.”—Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and SweetIn the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption. 

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

Warren Read is the author of the memoir, The Lyncher in Me, about his discovery that his great-grandfather had incited a lynching in 1920, and two novels: Ash Falls, which was called “a moody, haunting foray into rural Americana in the mold of Daniel Woodrell and Christian Kiefer,” by Kirkus, and One Simple Thing, which Publishers Weekly declared to be “a gripping tale of crime, intrigue, and complicated family relationships.” Warren earned his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.