Grist Mill Road

by Christopher J. Yates

Overview

An Entertainment Weekly "Must Read" • One of the NPR Book Concierge's "Best Books of the Year"
"Twisty and told from multiple perspectives, this meaty thriller races to a satisfying finish." —People magazine

"The intensity of the storytelling is exhilarating and unsettling." —Booklist (starred review)

Twenty-six years ago Hannah had her eye shot out. Now she wants justice. But is she blind to the truth?

Christopher J. Yates’s cult hit Black Chalk introduced that rare writerly talent: a literary writer who could write a plot with the intricacy of a brilliant mental puzzle, and with characters so absorbing that readers are immediately gripped. Yates’s new book does not disappoint. Grist Mill Road is a dark, twisted, and expertly plotted Rashomon-style tale. The year is 1982; the setting, an Edenic hamlet some ninety miles north of New York City. There, among the craggy rock cliffs and glacial ponds of timeworn mountains, three friends—Patrick, Matthew, and Hannah—are bound together by a terrible and seemingly senseless crime. Twenty-six years later, in New York City, living lives their younger selves never could have predicted, the three meet again—with even more devastating results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250150301
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/31/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,044,824
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER J. YATES was born and raised in Kent and studied law at Oxford University before working as a puzzle editor in London. He lives in New York City with his wife and dog. His first book, Black Chalk, was an NPR "Best of the Year" selection.

Editorial Reviews

"The plot is darkly, intricately layered, full of pitfalls and switchbacks, smart and funny and moving and merciless; the characters are all that and more. This is a powerful exploration of how truth isn't a complete and immutable thing, or a pure force of redemption: it's made up of broken shards that lie buried somewhere in the spaces between people, and when the jagged edges work their way to the surface, they can be devastating." —Tana French, author of the New York Times bestselling In the Woods and The Trespasser

"Arresting...Twisting backward and forward in time, entering the minds of each character in turn, Yates examines both how they reached this point and what happens years later, when the past wreaks havoc on the present....[A] sophisticated...elegant narrative." —The New York Times

"Dark, intense, and disturbing, Christopher Yates’s Grist Mill Road begins with a shock and keeps the suspense burning page after page. A thriller with imagination to spare. Highly recommended." —Krysten Ritter, author of Bonfire

"Christopher Yates's Grist Mill Road is a terrific thriller. A horrid childhood crime carried secretly to adulthood, with menace lurking around the corner, and guilt hanging heavy overhead. Alfred Hitchcock would have optioned the plot in the blink of his gimlet eye. A gripping read." —Jason Matthews, author of the bestselling Red Sparrow trilogy

"The list of authors whose books I read automatically is very short, and loses more names than it adds most years. Now the British writer Christopher J. Yates is on it, thanks to this truly superb second novel, a dark, roving psychological thriller as powerful as anything by Tana French...irresistibly readable...make no mistake: Yates is the real deal." —USA Today

"Shuffling and reshuffling one’s narrators has become almost a sport among suspense novelists, some of whom take it to excess. This reader, for one, balked when Paula Hawkins in effect brought one of her characters in The Girl on the Train back from the dead, out of temporal sequence, to supply crucial information. Yates eschews such highhanded artifice, tacking back and forth in time, and from one narrator to another, with extraordinary skill.” —Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post

"Two of life's delicious pleasures—gourmet delectations and a sinister, plot-twisty tale—come together in this intelligent thriller." —Oprah.com

"The intensity of the storytelling is exhilarating and unsettling." —Booklist (starred review)

"An intricately crafted novel about adult lives forever changed by closely held childhood secrets. Grist Mill Road is a compulsive read that will unsettle you from its first page and surprise you until its very last." —Jung Yun, author of Shelter

“Grist Mill Road is full of tension and unexpected twists.” —Angela Carone, San Diego Magazine “5 Books to Read in January”

“Yates constructed a thrilling psychological puzzle in his first novel, Black Chalk. With his second, he’s written an even more complex and propulsive whodunnit laced with questions about moral responsibility, the relativity of truth, the reliability of memory and the long-term consequences of our actions.” —Jane Ciabattari, BBC.COM “10 Books to Read in 2018"

From the Publisher

…a whydunnit that delves deep into the secrets linking the main characters…Yates's previous book, Black Chalk, had a delicious premise: an escalating game of dare over the years among friends who meet at Oxford…[Grist Mill Road] is more sophisticated, starting from the fully realized stories the characters are awarded in the service of an elegant narrative…You have to work hard to follow the winding road Yates sends us down, and the drive is full of pleasantly unpleasant surprises.

The New York Times - Sarah Lyall

★ 10/30/2017
Yates follows his well-received debut, Black Chalk, with an edgy, intelligent thriller that explores the aftermath of a senseless crime. In 1982, 13-year-old Matthew Weaver ties Hannah Jensen, who’s also 13, to a tree in the woods outside Roseborn, N.Y., and shoots her with a BB gun 49 times, including through the eye. Patrick “Patch” McConnell, a friend of Matthew’s, is walking nearby and hears the shots. When Patch arrives at the scene, he at first thinks Hannah is dead, but she survives her injuries. Flash forward to 2008, when all three are living in New York City. Hannah, now a crime reporter, is married to Patch, who puts all his energies into his food blog and fantasizing about getting even with the boss who recently laid him off. A chance meeting with Matthew brings to the surface the anger and violence each has repressed. The reader’s sympathies shift as each character brings a different perspective to the events that shaped them. Unexpected twists keep the tension high. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

11/01/2017
Yates's (Black Chalk) sophomore novel is a fun-house mirror of a single, horrific incident that defines three lives. Patch, Hannah, and Matthew enter the New York woods in 1982 as young teens, and what happens there changes each of them irrevocably. The structure is a fine example of the Rashomon effect, set with alternating points-of-view of the three involved. Patch and Hannah tell their tales in distinctive first-person voices, while Matthew's story is recounted in the second person, which only adds to the divergence of accounts, along with an overarching third-person omniscient narration that's set 26 years later when the protagonists' lives once again collide. Smart, beautiful, and unrelenting prose puts the reader right into the scenes, making it difficult to decide which of the trio—none of them are particularly likable, but each is engaging in his or her own way—is telling the truth. VERDICT This fast-paced, suspenseful journey through the minds of these characters will fascinate Donna Tartt fans and readers who enjoy twisty, intellectual thrillers and unreliable narration. [See Prepub Alert, 7/24/17; library marketing.]—Charli Osborne, Oak Park P. L., MI

Library Journal

Four distinct voices tell the story of a disturbing incident and its far-reaching aftermath. In 1982, teenager Matthew brutally assaulted Hannah with a BB gun while Patrick, frozen by indecision, just watched. Fast forward to 2008—Hannah is married to Patrick, though she doesn’t remember that he witnessed the shooting. Then Matthew reenters their lives, triggering yet another descent into violence. Each adult character looks back retrospectively on 1982. Narrators Dan Bittner, Saskia Maarleveld, and Graham Halstead do a marvelous job delivering first-person accounts leading to the same terrible crime. Will Damron provides a taut narration of the 2008 events, which are told omnisciently in the third person. It’s a labyrinth of shifting perspectives, but the narrators keep this grim story focused and mesmerizing. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2018 - AudioFile

★ 2017-09-28
A defining moment of violence inextricably links the lives of three young adults in Yates' (Black Chalk, 2015) psychological thriller."I remember the gunshots made a wet sort of sound, phssh phssh phssh, and each time he hit her she screamed. Do the math and the whole thing probably went on for as long as 10 minutes. I just stood there and watched." Yates' novel begins with this visceral description that immediately establishes a complex relationship not only between Patrick, the narrator of these lines, and Matthew, his friend and the perpetrator, but also between memory and the truth. The novel cuts between a first-person narrative of Patrick at 12, documenting the events that led up to this shocking BB gun attack, and a third-person narrative of Patrick and his wife, Hannah, in 2008. As newlyweds, they are trying to find their way through the economic collapse and Patrick's loss of his job; Hannah is a reporter interested in writing a true-crime book. She is also the victim of the earlier crime, and while she knows about Patrick's connection to Matthew, she has no idea that he actually witnessed what happened and failed to stop it. Much of the book explores the ways in which they individually struggle to come to terms with and exorcise guilt before the past can destroy their present and future happiness. If this sounds complicated, it is—humanly complicated and narratively complicated—but successfully and movingly so. Yates manages to take a brutal incident and, by the end, create understanding for all three major characters involved: the victim, the perpetrator, and the witness. By doing so, he drives home the messages that truth is always subjective and that true, compassionate love is always redemptive. It's the compassion part, he argues, at which most of us tend to fail.Mesmerizing and impossible to put down, this novel demands full attention, full empathy, and full responsibility; in return it offers poignant insight into human fragility and resilience.

Kirkus Reviews