In the novel The Sweet Hereafter, published in 1991, author Russell Banks tells the story of a fatal school bus accident and its aftermath through four first-person narrators. As the novel unfolds in the small town of Sam Dent, New York the characters reveal exactly what happened on the day of the accident—January 27, 1990—the immediate reaction of the people involved, and how each of the four characters is changed by the accident. Fourteen children die in the accident, and eight different families lose one or more of their children. One girl, an eighth-grade beauty queen named Nichole Burnell, survives but suffers a severe and disabling back injury. 

The novel explores themes of loss, grief, guilt, blame, judgment, justice, denial, comprehension, isolation, and death. It also explores the role that children play both in their parents’ lives and in the larger community. 

The novel opens with bus driver Dolores Driscoll attempting to explain what she saw in the road, on the day of the accident, that made her turn the wheel and trigger the crash. She explains that she was trying to avoid hitting something, but she is not sure what it was exactly, if anything. The reader learns later that the bus crashed through a guard rail, fell down an embankment, slid across the ice of a sand pit filled with water, and then broke the ice and sank, back end first, into the freezing water. 

In her chapter, Dolores is looking back on what happened in the past, so she has the benefit of hindsight. She tries to explain and defend herself by detailing how conscientious she is and how well she knew the roads and weather conditions. She says she was driving about 50 to 55 miles per hour at the time of the accident. Dolores describes the various children she picked up along the way to school that morning. She also describes their families, and the landscape, both geographic and psychological. The chapter’s ending coincides with Dolores’ description of the moment the accident occurs. The novel will return to Dolores’ first-person perspective in the fifth and final chapter.

In the second chapter, Vietnam veteran and widower Billy Ansel, who is generally considered an honorable man and who owns a car repair shop, discusses the bus accident, which he witnessed because he was driving behind the bus in his truck. Ansel’s only children, twins Jessica and Mason, die in the accident. Ansel participates in the rescue efforts and soon after the accident begins drinking heavily. He explains that his wife, Lydia, died a few years earlier from cancer and also describes an incident in Jamaica, in which he was afraid he had lost his daughter, Jessica. Ansel repeatedly says that he wants to join Mason, Jessica, and Lydia and that he feels he is a ghost in some kind of purgatory. He also reveals that, prior to the accident, he had been having an affair with Risa Walker, who is married to Ansel’s friend, Wendell. The Walkers lose their only child, Sean, in the accident. After the accident, Ansel and Risa see each other one more time and then never again because, as Ansel says, they are different people after the accident. Ansel rebuffs the efforts of attorney Mitchell Stephens to have Ansel join in a lawsuit. By the end of the novel, Ansel has descended into alcoholism. 

In the third chapter, attorney Mitchell Stephens describes his efforts to recruit the parents of the children who died as plaintiffs for a negligence lawsuit. Stephens says that he is fueled primarily by anger and a desire to take to task whomever is really responsible for the crash, which he says is not an accident because there are no such things as accidents. Stephens convinces several families to sign contingency fee agreements with him, although he deliberately alienates Ansel because Stephens needs Ansel as an independent witness, in order to say how fast Dolores was driving. Stephens needs Dolores not to be at fault so he can instead blame the town of Sam Dent and state of New York and, ultimately, reach the deep pockets of those entities’ insurance companies. Stephens also tries to recruit Dolores, but she refuses when her husband, Abbott, says that the town should be her jury, not a bunch of strangers. Stephens also shares that his daughter, Zoe, is a drug addict and that he feels that he, too, has lost a child and that America has in many ways taken most parents’ children away from them. Stephens discusses an incident twenty years earlier, when Zoe almost died due to spider bites, and he had been prepared to give her an emergency tracheotomy with a knife. At the end of the chapter, Zoe tells Stephens that she has contracted HIV; this represents a turning point in their relationship, and in Stephens’ understanding of his own identity. 

In the fourth chapter, eighth-grader Nichole Burnell describes her experience of surviving the accident. She woke up in the hospital with a broken back and various other complications. Prior to the accident, Nichole was a popular cheerleader, sought-after babysitter, and queen of a school dance. Nichole reveals that her father, Sam Burnell, had been sexually abusing her before the accident and that no one else knew about it. Stephens wants to use Nichole as the lynchpin in his lawsuit. Nichole’s parents, who are living vicariously through her and counted on her to be successful on their behalf, join the lawsuit. After the accident, Nichole begins to transition from childhood and adulthood, ultimately relying on her mind, rather than her body, and becoming more in control of her own life. When the time comes for Nichole to go through the process of a legal deposition, she surprises everyone by saying (and lying) that she saw exactly how fast Dolores was driving and that it was 72 miles per hour, well over the legal limit. In essence, Nichole destroys the case, not just for her parents, but also for the entire town.

In the fifth and final chapter, Dolores describes a day about a year after the accident, when she and her husband, Abbott, attend the town fair and are shunned. After the crowd cheers for the destruction of a car that Dolores used to own in the demolition derby, Dolores learns that Nichole Burnell said that Dolores was driving 72 miles per hour at the time of the accident. Dolores comes to understand that the entire town thinks, inaccurately, that she was driving too fast and caused the accident. Surprisingly, she feels liberated but also realizes that she is completely alone and forever changed, as are the children involved in the accident. Dolores decides that she must leave Sam Dent. The novel ends with Dolores driving Abbott away from the fair as animal eyes flash and then recede into the darkness on the side of the road.