Novels
- Quakertown (2001)
- The Bright Forever (2005)
- River of Heaven (2008)
- Break the Skin (2011)
- Late One Night (2016)
- Yours, Jean (2020)
Collections
- The Least You Need to Know (1996)
- The Mutual UFO Network (2018)
Non fiction
- From Our House (2000)
- Turning Bones (2003)
- Such a Life (2012)
- Telling Stories (2017)
- Gone the Hard Road (2021)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Lee Martin Books Overview
Quakertown
In Quakertown, award winning author Lee Martin travels back to 1920s Texas to tell the story of a flourishing black community that was segregated from its white neighbors and of the remarkable gardener, Little Washington Jones, who was asked to make a heartbreaking choice. Based on a true story, Quakertown draws on the rich texture of the South of the Pecan Creek running along the edges of the town, the spectacular and rare white lilac, and the rising racial tensions that bubble under the surface and threaten to tear neighbors apart. With rare skill and compassion, Lee Martin carves out the delicate story of two families one white and one black and the child whose birth brings a gift of forgiveness. ‘A consistently impressive and often dazzling new novel. In his richly dramatic re imagining of the events behind Quakertown‘s demise, Lee Martin has written one of the finest novels of the year.’ Jabari Asim, The Washington Post
The Bright Forever
On an evening like any other, nine year old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books. This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a suspenseful, deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Keeping fact, speculation, and contradiction playing off one another as the details unfold, author Lee Martin creates a fast paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. His beautiful, clear eyed prose builds to an extremely nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss. Reminiscent of books such as The Little Friend and The Lovely Bones, but most memorable for its own perceptions and power, The Bright Forever is a compelling and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truth. A Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and Book of the Month ClubAlso available as a Books on Tape AudioBook and an eBook
River of Heaven
You have to know the rest of my story, the part I can t yet bring myself to say. A story of a boy I knew a long time ago and a brother I loved and then lost. Past and present collide in Lee Martin’s highly anticipated novel of a man, his brother, and the dark secret that both connects and divides them. Haunting and beautifully wrought, River of Heaven weaves a story of love and loss, confession and redemption, and the mystery buried with a boy named Dewey Finn. On an April evening in 1955, Dewey died on the railroad tracks outside Mt. Gilead, Illinois, and the mystery of his death still confounds the people of this small town. River of Heaven begins some fifty years later and centers on the story of Dewey s boyhood friend Sam Brady, whose solitary adult life is much formed by what really went on in the days leading up to that evening at the tracks. It s a story he d do anything to keep from telling, but when his brother, Cal, returns to Mt. Gilead after decades of self exile, it threatens to come to the surface.A Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Bright Forever, Lee Martin masterfully conveys, with a voice that is at once distinct and lyrical, one man s struggle to come to terms with the outcome of his life. Powerful and captivating, River of Heaven is about the high cost of living a lie, the chains that bind us to our past, and the obligations we have to those we love. From the Hardcover edition.
Break the Skin
Laney a skinny, awkward teenager alone in the world thinks she’s found a kindred spirit in thirty five year old Delilah. Then the police come to ask Laney questions and she finds herself reconstructing a story of suspense, deceit, and revenge; a story that will haunt her forever. Seven hundred miles away, in Texas, Miss Baby has the hardened heart of a woman who has been used by men in every possible way, yet she is desperate for true love. When she meets a stranger, a man who claims he can t remember his real name or his past but who seems gentle and trusting, Miss Baby thinks she may have finally found someone to love, someone who will protect her from the abusive men who fill her past. But Miss Baby and Laney are connected by a terrible crime, and, bit by bit, the complex web of deceptions and seemingly small misjudgments they ve each helped to create start to unravel. Action, speculation, and contradiction play off one another as the story is told through their first person voices, which keep you nervously guessing all the way to the shocking, tragic climax. Break the Skin is expert storyteller Lee Martin at his very best.
The Least You Need to Know
Lee Martin was born in Illinois. He earned his MFA from the University of Arkansas, and his Ph.D. From the University of Nebraska Lincoln. His stories have been widely published in journals including The Georgia Review, Story, Double Take, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train Stories. He received a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction 1995 as well as Individual Arts Fellowships in Fiction from the Ohio Arts Council 1987 and the Tennessee Arts Commission 1989.’Together, the pieces make for a hauntingly coherent first collection, often about pitiful family scenarios in which loyalties are tested, lies offered and exposed, and in which ironies abound…
. Bleak, midwestern landscapes well serve many of these stark and solid narratives.’ Kirkus Reviews’…
Throughout the book, Martin’s writing is sensitive and lucid…
. The characters he writes about are utterly real…
their concerns and joys are perfectly identifiable and voiced with passion.’ Publishers Weekly’Most of the stories in this debut collection revolve around the relationship between teen age sons and their fathers in the Midwest of the 1950s and 60s. Although Lee Martin favors endings in which the young protagonist’s world is shattered by a selfish paternal act, he manages to infuse each of these similar situations with its own particular twist…
. What his characters learn…
is just how easily a life can come apart.’ The New York Times Book Review’The Least You Need to Know is Lee Martin’s first book, and a strange and familiar one it is. There must be a thousand stories…
about the relations of fathers and sons: the hokiest of themes, covered since Telemachus went in search of Odysseus…
. Martin’s real, and promising, gift is to turn this cliche back into the urgent, intensely personal myth of growth it really is, and always has been.’ San Jose Mercury News’Martin’s stories are solidly crafted, imaginative, and stoically compassionate.’ BookLovers’Martin succeeds with his own portraits, with his own skill for precise and intricate detail…
. t he most exciting moments in Martin’s writing come not from the dramati
From Our House
From Our House is the luminous and uniquely American memoir of Lee Martin, born into a farming family the same year his father unexpectedly lost both hands. Lee’s father, once known for doing a good turn for his neighbors, changed that afternoon in the cornfields, becoming an embittered, hardened man. All our lives have private truths, Martin writes, and the truth about my father was that after his accident he brought a deep and abiding rage into our home. I knew his hooks as intimately as I ever knew anything about my father.
How easily our bodies become us, our souls bound to the material, to the joy or grief or pain we feel through our skin, Martin muses. Ultimately it is his mother s quiet compassion that accounts for the grace that Lee and his father finally discover both within themselves and within their small family. Learning to live by the seasons and to fall asleep to the rumble of his father s tractor, braving snowstorms to sell hogs or to visit an ailing grandmother, playing basketball, listening to baseball games, and stealing records, Lee endures the anger and shame that haunt his family yet grows up to tell his tale with rare beauty and remarkable forbearance.
Turning Bones
Farmers and pragmatists, hardworking people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin’s ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from the birth certificates and gravestones that marked their comings and goings, they left little written record of their lives. So when Lee, the last living Martin, inherited his great grandfather s eighty acres and needed to know what had brought his family to this pass and this point, he had only the barest of public records and the stirrings of his imagination to connect him to his past, and to his beginnings. Turning Bones is the remarkable story brought to life by this collaboration of personal history and fiction. It is the moving account of a family s migration over two hundred years and through six generations, imagined, reconstructed, and made to speak to the author, and to readers, of a lost world. A recovery of the missing, Turning Bones is also one man s story of love and compromise as he separates himself from his family s agrarian history, fully knowing by book s end what such a journey has cost.
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