by Dede Montgomery

“With great and detailed backstories that bring these characters to life, Montgomery sends the universal message that we cannot live a full and contented life in isolation. We need each other — people to witness us, to help us, to guide us, and sometimes, these people are not our closest friends or family. It’s people outside of our circle looking for the same things we’re looking for: human connection. This is a warm and well-structured novel with a life-affirming message worth the read.” — Feminist Book Review

“Memoirist Dede Montgomery has the uncanny ability to create the quality of presence inside story. This time, it’s through her fiction. Whether at the Columbia River shoreline with a man struggling to gather up a bottle with a note inside or in a restaurant with a waitress witnessing a meeting that will change lives, we are there, moved by these characters, cheering them on and celebrating how interconnected we humans are. Beyond the Ripples will capture your heart." — Jane Kirkpatrick, Award-winning author of Everything She Didn’t Say

"In Beyond the Ripples, Dede Montgomery takes us on a moving, heartfelt journey through the lives of a cast of characters fatefully joined by a note in a bottle set adrift in the Willamette River.  The characters—the young girl who launched the bottle, a kind octogenarian who finds it, his successful daughter who feels inexplicably unfulfilled, a salesclerk struggling to rise above an abusive husband and a controlling mother, and a burned-out teacher searching for meaning—all live and breathe with human authenticity.  This beautiful book is a story of love, friendship, and growth, and a meditation on the abiding need we all have for human connection." — Warren C. Easley, author of Moving Targets, book 6 in the Cal Claxton Oregon Mysteries

​"An old fisherman, a letter, an unlikely friendship and the big rivers of Oregon–-the Willamette and Columbia, inspired this fictionalized multi-story, threaded from the stories of a bygone era and rippling with the power of synchronicity that occurs whenever someone finds a message in a bottle. An enduring, reflective, and soulful read for a winter's night." — ​Jenny Forrester, author of Narrow River, Wide Sky: A Memoir