The Evening Shades

The highly anticipated follow-up to Pulitzer Prize finalist The Bright Forever, The Evening Shades tells the story of two lonely people in a small Midwestern town and the dark secrets tormenting them . . .

One afternoon in the autumn of 1972, a lonely widow in Mt. Gilead, Illinois, makes the impromptu decision to rent out a room in her house to a stranger who has come to town. It is risky--she doesn’t know anything about him. But Edith Green can no longer bear a life lived alone. And Henry Dees is haunted by the past he carries with him from another small town, particularly by the death of a little girl that some people think was his fault.

And slowly, Henry and Edith’s suspenseful dance between secrets and trust leads them to start revealing things to each other -- and themselves ...

Lee Martin is the author of the novels, The Bright Forever, (Shaye Areheart Books, 2005), a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; River of Heaven (Shaye Areheart Books, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); From Our House (Dutton, 2000); Quakertown (Dutton, 2001); and nine other books. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. His books have been translated into five different languages, and they’ve been selections of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers series as well as the Quality Paperback Book Club, the Book of the Month Club, the Doubleday Book Club, and the Literary Guild. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.