Dream of the Blue Room

Jenny and Amanda Ruth were best friends in a small Alabama town until eighteen-years-old Amanda Ruth was murdered. Now, fourteen years later, Jenny has traveled with her husband to China to scatter Amanda Ruth’s ashes and finally fulfill her friend’s dream of visiting her Chinese father’s homeland. It’s also, Jenny hopes, an opportunity to repair her own troubled marriage. But as she journeys through a foreign landscape, the guilty secrets of Jenny’s past rise up and her life will be inexorably altered.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog (“Highly recommended [for fans of] authors like Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard” —Library Journal, starred review) and No One You Know (“Luminous . . . will keep you thinking long after the last page has been turned”—Family Circle), Michelle Richmond’s stunning novel captivates with its depiction of the powerful intimacies of marriage, friendship, and family that shape our paths and the bonds of home that buoy us—wherever home may be.

Set against the impressive landscape of the Yangtze River, "Dream of the Blue Room" explores the nature of friendship and the deep intimacy that often exists between young friends as they struggle toward adulthood.

On a warm night in July, thirty-two-year-old Jenny finds herself sitting on the deck of a Chinese cruise ship next to a charming but secretive stranger. Her husband, Dave, is down in their cabin sleeping, and in Jenny's lap is a cookie tin containing the ashes of her best friend Amanda Ruth, brutally murdered fourteen years earlier. In this foreign landscape filled with ancient cities and doomed villages, removed from the comforts and rituals of home, Jenny must confront her haunted past and decide the direction of her future. Dream of the Blue Room explores the nature of friendship and the deep intimacy that often exists between young friends as they struggle toward adulthood. Set against the impressive landscape of the Yangtze River, the novel encompasses the dramatic changes of our world and the results of the human desire to control and tame what is ultimately untamable.

Michelle Richmond is the author of The Year of Fog, Dream of the Blue Room, and the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.