Lullaby Road

By: James Anderson

Narrated by: Graham Winton

Ben Jones, protagonist of the glowingly reviewed Never-Open Desert Diner, returns in a devastatingly powerful literary crime novel about parenthood, loss, and the desert in winter. Winter has come to Highway 117, a remote road through the Utah desert trafficked only by oddballs, fugitives, and those looking to escape the world. So when local truck driver Ben Jones finds an abandoned, mute Hispanic child at a lonely gas station along his route, far from any semblance of proper civilization, he knows something has gone terribly awry. With the help of his eccentric neighbors, Ben sets out to help the kid and learn the truth. In the process he makes new friends and loses old ones, finds himself in mortal danger, and uncovers buried secrets far more painful than he could have imagined.

Author bio: James Anderson was born in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He is a graduate of Reed College and received his MFA in creative writing from Pine Manor College. His first novel was The Never-Open Desert Diner. His short fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines, including The Bloomsbury Review, New Letters, Solstice, Northwest Review, Southern Humanities Review, and others, and he previously served as the publisher and editor in chief of Breitenbush Books. He currently divides his time between Colorado and Oregon.

©2018 James Anderson (P)2018 Recorded Books

The ending was good.

I ended up giving this a higher score than I thought I would because the ending was good. The rest of the book was kind of long and boring.
The narrator had a voice like Clint Eastwood or similar.

great story

James Anderson is a great writer that my husband and I enjoy. I didn't care for the narrator as it changed from the first book. however I slowed it to 0.80 speed and I enjoyed the book.

It grew on me

At the beginning,, I thought the premise of a trucker babysitting two children and a dog while driving his truck into the Utah desert in dicey weather was just short of silly. But Ben, voiced by narrator, Graham Winston, grew on me. The story unfolded in ever more complex ways, peopled by unpredictable, interesting characters. It’s a long trip from the first to the last mile on this intricate journey. Not bad at all.

Great follow up to an outstanding original

I really enjoyed the Never Open Desert Diner and it was fun to rehash the characters and dive further into their worlds.

Another outstanding story

I read the first book in this thus-far duology, so decided to listen to the second. Life is not easy on this unforgiving stretch of Utah highway, and things have a way of ending badly and/or violently.Trucker Ben is the friend you hope to have: loyal, fierce, irreverent, determined. And everyone here is wounded in some way. The plot is complicated, wonderfully twisty; the narration spot on. One of my favorite authors.

Preachy Leftist Drivel

You could listen to any Bernie Sanders stump speech for free and get the same ideas promoted by this book. The basic tenets of this book are: poor people are noble, people with money all suck ( or are mean and/or are criminals), straight people aren't cool, gay people are; single mothers are heroes, only police and the military should have firearms; citizens living in an unforgiving desert only own firearms because they are weak or have some type of character flaw. Furthermore, the protagonist, a single male, is a white knight who agrees to take care of two children to whom he is not related; in this PC, #metoo culture this is just laughable. It is as if this author had an index card with all the liberal constructs he needed to hit and he made sure he checked them all, almost as if he was proving his liberal 'cred' to a group of undergraduate English majors (think Stephen Bishop's character in Animal House). I don't know anything about this author but it appears this was written by a guy with little life experience sitting in a coffee shop in either Portland or Seattle sipping a complicated coffee drink pecking away at his laptop. Save a credit and just watch 20 minutes of Bernie and get the same sermon for free. If the author wanted some plausibility his character would have been running his business in either the bakken oil fields or west Texas where there is more work and more chance for profits, but the author seems to know very little about capitalism or how the world outside a university bubble really works. I am sorry I sugar coated my review. Cheers,