A Bend in the Road

A Bend in the Road is a novel by the American writer Nicholas Sparks, published in 2001 and his fifth book.

Miles and Sarah reach each other slowly, and the novel spends its first half on the practical parts of a life that has to be rebuilt: a father learning what his son needs, a woman starting again in a town where she knows nobody, a job that occasionally puts Miles in the position of judging other people's mistakes. What the reader understands before either of them does is that they are already connected by the accident, and the second half of the book is about what happens when that knowledge arrives, which is where the novel is more serious than its premise suggests. Sparks based the story on his brother-in-law, and it belongs to the period in which his novels about small-town North Carolina were establishing the formula he has used repeatedly: two decent people, one piece of withheld information and a resolution that has to be earned rather than discovered. It is also one of the books in which the town's ordinary obligations matter as much as the romance, since Miles's authority as a deputy is what makes his search for the driver a matter of public rather than private consequence.