Highway Blue

A hypnotic debut of young love on the run, from a blazing new talent Anne Marie is adrift San Padua, living a precarious life of shift-work and shared apartments. Her husband Cal left her on their first anniversary and two years later, she can't move on. When he shows up suddenly on her doorstep, clearly in some kind of trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in an alley near the shore and the young couple flee together, crammed into a beat up car with their broken past. Their ill-at-ease odyssey takes them across a shimmering American landscape and through the darker seams of the country, towards a city that may or may not represent salvation. Highway Blue is a story of being lost and found; of love, in all its forms; and of how the pursuit of love is, in its turn, a kind of redemption.

About the Author :
Ailsa McFarlane was born in 1997 in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in Snowdonia in the United Kingdom. After leaving school, she studied veterinary science before dropping out to travel the United States and Europe by road. Highway Blue is her first novel.

Review :
Poignant, moving, and cinematic, this is a story imbued with love and loss that feels at once distantly dreamlike and vividly recognisable. Highway Blue is a beautiful, inspired rendering of the on-the-road journey. At its core is an unforgettable protagonist in Anne Marie. McFarlane has written an irresistible story of love and life's meanderings. A very gifted writer, I was entranced. Ailsa McFarlane's prose combines the razor sharp truth telling of Ottessa Moshfegh with the troubled heart of Raymond Carver, using plain language to conjure a shockingly intense way of seeing. I've never read anything quite like it. I loved Highway Blue - a dark, glimmering, journey deep into modern America on a knife edge between love and dependence. Hypnotic, stylish, cinematic: Highway Blue holds you captive like a blues song or incantation. In Highway Blue, the richness and pathos of the ordinary is heightened by the private mysteries of McFarlane's innocent fugitives as they run from both the law and themselves. It is a harrowing journey, but one filled with unexpected kindnesses and the illuminating effect of transformation. I so admire it. If one of America's many complicated attributes is its ability to let whole lives pass without being seen, Ailsa McFarlane reminds us that language can bring these same lives into stark and penetrating relief. Highway Blue is a road novel, a love story, a coming of age, but with sentences so sharply wrought, characters so achingly precise, that it feels new and fresh and utterly alive. McFarlane deftly pulls the strings of her cinematic plot, making sure it never descends into melodrama. Instead, the story remains gripping, yet thought-provoking - a poignant comment on the modern condition. Highway Blue is a beautiful, sun-drenched road novel... A novel that's in love with the idea of America, both contemporary in its concerns and deeply nostalgic