NEW YORK – Perched in her home amid Colorado’s Elk Mountains, author Shelley Read is astounded by the global triumph of her first novel, “Go as a River.”
“Before the book even hit U.S. shelves, over 30 translations were already set,” shares Read, a fifth-generation native of Colorado residing in a self-built home in Crested Butte with her husband. “At that point, I thought, ‘Wow.’ It’s exhilarating, daunting, and wonderful all at once.”
Released in 2023 by Spiegel & Grau, “Go as a River” initially garnered limited attention outside of trade reviews and collected mostly regional accolades, such as the High Plains Book Award and the Reading the West Book Award. Yet, the novel has achieved remarkable success, becoming a bestseller in diverse regions from North America to Scandinavia and surpassing one million copies sold. A film adaptation is in the works, with Mazur Kaplan overseeing the project and Eliza Hittman, known for the acclaimed “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” set to direct.
The 300-page narrative unfolds from the 1940s through the 1970s, focusing on a 17-year-old farm girl in Colorado whose doomed love affair with a transient Indigenous man influences lives for generations. “Go as a River” exemplifies how a book can captivate audiences without needing celebrity endorsements or a well-known author. It places 61-year-old Read among a unique group of debut authors over 50 — like Frank McCourt and Louis Begley — who achieve widespread acclaim after finally penning their long-conceived stories.
“What she’s achieved is remarkable,” notes Cindy Spiegel, co-founder of Spiegel & Grau. “Occasionally, someone emerges who has nurtured a vision for many years and then truly brings it to life. Most people don’t reach that point.”
Originally from Colorado Springs, Read holds a degree from the University of Denver and a master’s from Temple University’s creative writing program. Her extensive experience as an educator, coupled with her deep appreciation for authors like Virginia Woolf and Czeslaw Milosz, eventually culminated in the creation of her own literary work.
A teacher with a story of her own
For nearly three decades, she taught writing and literature among other subjects at Western Colorado University. During that time, a character kept turning up in her thoughts, the germ of what became her novel’s protagonist, Victoria Nash. There was something about Victoria, an empathetic quality, Read related to. But she had her career and two young children, and “was just trying to keep my head above water as a super busy mom and with a lot of very intense challenges.”
With Victoria unwilling to leave her be, Read began jotting down notes on Post-its, napkins and other papers that might be around. With her husband’s encouragement, she took early retirement and committed to completing her book. She had written stories in her early years, but had never attempted a full-length narrative.
“I had no idea where it was going. I had no intentions about where it was going, because I had never written a novel before,” Read says, speaking via Zoom from her home. “Once I figured out this was going to be a novel, I was like, ‘Oh no!’ I have studied novels thousands of times throughout my life, but I never even considered that I would write one.”
Read stepped down in 2018 and by the following year had finished a manuscript, drawn in part from such historical events as a 1960s flood in Iola, Colorado, and from her lifelong affinity for the local landscape. First-time authors of any age struggle to find representation, but during a 2017 writers conference at Western Colorado University, Read had met Sandra Bond, a Denver-based agent. A “Colorado girl,” Bond calls herself.
“We hit it off immediately,” Bond says. “We have very similar backgrounds in growing up in Colorado.”
Writing is rewriting
Read’s manuscript “knocked my socks off,” Bond remembers, but it wasn’t an easy sell. The second half of the book “didn’t quite meet the standards of the first” and Bond didn’t have the editing skills to fix it. “Go as a River” was turned down by 21 publishers before Spiegel signed it up. Spiegel & Grau, which began as a Penguin Random House imprint and reopened in 2020 as an independent a year after PRH shut it down amid a corporate reorganization, has worked with authors ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sara Gruen to Iain Pears and Kathryn Stockett.
“I had a feeling Cindy might be able to see how to guide Shelley in revising the second half — what was really working and what wasn’t and why,” Bond says.
Spiegel and Read worked on revisions — the finished version is entirely from Victoria’s perspective; the original draft shifted narrators midway. Meanwhile, the publisher showed the manuscript to the international agent Susanna Lea, who “read it one sitting” and quickly arranged for meetings with foreign publishers. It was mid-July, and she remembers tracking down publishers in Norway and Finland and other parts of Scandinavia at a time of year when book executives usually are on vacation.
“Suddenly, they were all reachable,” she says.
Read is working on a second novel, set in southeastern Colorado, where her homesteader-grandparents lived. Meanwhile, royalties from “Go as a River” allowed her a few indulgences, from installing solar panels on her house to a little travel, not to mention paying off college tuition for her son and building up the family retirement savings.
“Not too sexy,” she acknowledges. “We’re still do-it-yourselfers, & I still drive an old Toyota pickup. The main thing about the royalties is that I get to be a writer for a living, and that is a dream come true.”
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