Summit County picks Go as a River for 2026 community read

Summit County has chosen Shelley Read’s Go as a River for its 2026 One Book One Community program, setting up a summer of shared reading that reaches from Park City Library to neighborhood book clubs and local library shelves across the county.

The selection places a story of loss and endurance at the center of a civic conversation that fits Summit County’s own landscape. Go as a River follows Victoria Nash, a young woman on her family’s peach farm in Iola, Colorado, as she faces grief, survival and a future shaped by forces beyond her control. The novel is inspired by the destruction of Iola and the damming of the Gunnison River in the 1960s, a history that gives the book particular resonance in a mountain county shaped by water, development and disappearing places.

That connection is not abstract. The National Park Service says Iola was abandoned in the early 1960s, with most structures dismantled and burned. Blue Mesa Reservoir began filling in 1966, flooding Iola and Cebolla, and the reservoir’s basin names preserve traces of those displaced communities. The Bureau of Reclamation says Blue Mesa Reservoir is Colorado’s largest reservoir, with a total capacity of 940,700 acre-feet and an active capacity of 748,430 acre-feet. The scale of that transformation mirrors the novel’s central tension between memory and change, a theme likely to resonate in Summit County, where residents know the histories buried beneath reservoirs such as Rockport and parts of the Jordanelle system.

Summit County Library says the novel has sold more than a million copies worldwide, has been translated into 34 languages and is in development for film with the Mazur Kaplan Company. The library also notes that Go as a River won the High Plains Book Award and the Reading the West Book Award. Read, a fifth-generation Coloradan, spent nearly three decades as a senior lecturer at Western Colorado University, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies and honors.

Residents will have a chance to meet Read in person on Thursday, July 30, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. in the Jim Santy Auditorium at the Park City Library. The presentation will be followed by a book signing, and books will be available through Dolly’s Bookstore. Summit County Library also is offering the novel in physical, ebook and audiobook formats, making it accessible to readers who want to join the conversation in the form that works best for them.

The community read continues a streak of books rooted in the Mountain West and its environmental and social history. Recent selections included Fire Weather by John Vaillant in 2025, Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine in 2024, Powder Days by Heather Hansman in 2023 and The Cold Millions by Jess Walter in 2022. This year, Summit County is asking readers to gather around a novel that treats a vanished town not as a footnote, but as a place worth remembering.