The Evening Road

Meet Ottie Lee Henshaw. Quick of mind and pleasing to the eye, she navigates a stifling marriage, a lecherous boss, and on one day in the summer of 1920, an odyssey across the countryside to witness a dark and fearful celebration. Meet Calla Destry. A young black woman desperate to escape a place where the stench of violence hangs heavy in the air, and to find the lover who has promised her a new life. Two remarkable women on the move through an America riven by fear and hatred. Every road leads to the bedlam of Marvel. There are buses laid on and Klan members gathering. Lives will collide and be changed forever.

About the Author :
Laird Hunt is the author of six novels, a collection of stories and two translations. Kind One was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, and his last novel, Neverhome, won the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine and The Bridge Prize and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger. He teaches in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Denver, where he edits the Denver Quarterly. He and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.

Review :
The Evening Road is a vivid, disturbing book, able to subvert itself in half a line, constantly challenging the reader’s expectations. Its ghost map is quickly established in the reader’s head, and as the characters fade into the margin of the final page, it is as if an inner landscape has altered. It is mature, accomplished, impressive. A strange, dazzling novel, as audacious as it is lyrical, that hauls up insight, sorrow, and even – somehow – wit from the well of American history. Hunt is an irresistibly inventive writer, slipping easily from crackling dialogue to dreamy lyricism… The Evening Road is a novel of depth and beauty, a meditation on history that speaks eloquently to the present, a book that sidles up behind you until you can feel its hot breath on the back of your neck. A story told from three viewpoints about the banality of evil, and what ordinary people must accept for that evil to prosper… One of the finest novels so far this year An astute investigation into the nature of evildoing In this startling and unforgettable novel, the characters explode off the page like fireworks on a very dark and disturbing night. Days later I’m still thinking about them, still hearing the cadence of Hunt’s poetic language, and still wondering which is more enduring, the darkness or the light. Wow! Beautifully crafted, seductive, evocative language and a story that punches you in the gut and lays you low and yet leaves you wanting more. It’s rich, deep, dark, harrowing stuff and it does what all great fiction does – it lays ahold of the heart and won’t let go. You’ll think about this book for weeks, if not years, to come. Engrossing...intriguing... Hunt finds history or the big events useful framing devices, but he is more interested in how words can do justice to single players and life's fraught moments... He is strange, challenging, and a joy to read. [An] excellent, dreamlike novel. Arresting and disturbing… a haunting novel packed with vivid scenes and memorable characters