NEW YORK – Nestled in the lofty peaks of Colorado’s Elk Mountains, author Shelley Read finds herself marveling at the global triumph of her debut novel, “Go as a River.”

Read, a proud fifth-generation Coloradan residing with her husband in Crested Butte in a home they constructed themselves, expresses her astonishment. “Before the book even launched in the U.S., it had already secured over 30 translation deals,” she shares. “That’s when I thought, ‘Wow.’ It’s both exhilarating and daunting.”

Released in 2023 by Spiegel & Grau, “Go as a River” initially received limited attention from major reviewers, aside from trade journals. Its accolades are largely regional, having won honors like the High Plains Book Award and the Reading the West Book Award. Despite this, the novel has captured the hearts of readers worldwide, topping bestseller lists from North America to Scandinavia, and selling over a million copies. A film adaptation is in the works by Mazur Kaplan, founded by producer Paula Mazur and independent bookseller Mitchell Kaplan, with Eliza Hittman, known for “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” expected to direct.

The 300-page narrative spans three decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, and follows a 17-year-old Colorado farm girl’s doomed romance with a wandering Indigenous man, exploring the enduring impact on their lives. “Go as a River” demonstrates that a book can achieve success without celebrity endorsements or a famous author. Shelley Read, at the age of 61, joins the ranks of first-time authors like Frank McCourt and Louis Begley, who, later in life, penned stories that resonate widely.

“What she’s accomplished is remarkable,” says Cindy Spiegel, co-founder of Spiegel & Grau. “Occasionally, someone emerges with a vision they’ve nurtured for years, and they actually bring it to life. Most people don’t.”

A native of Colorado Springs, Read is a graduate of the University of Denver who has a master’s degree from Temple University’s creative writing program. She is a longtime educator who parsed and absorbed so many books, with works by Virginia Woolf and Czeslaw Milosz among her favorites, that one of her own inevitably came out on the other end.

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.”