Shelley Read’s debut novel, GO AS A RIVER, is an international bestseller that has been translated into 34 languages and is in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. Winner of the High Plains Book Award for Fiction and the Reading the West Book Award for Debut Fiction, GO AS A RIVER is also a Sunday Times bestseller, a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Debut Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, and a Colorado Public Radio Books We Love selection, among other national and international accolades.

Shelley was an award-winning senior lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies and honors. She is a mom, mountaineer, world traveler and fifth-generation Coloradan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of Colorado’s Western Slope.

Books by Shelley Read

Go as a River

by Shelley Read - Fiction

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land. Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. She flees into the surrounding mountains where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the beautiful but harsh landscape the meaning and strength to move forward and rebuild all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her homeland.