The Evening Road

by Laird Hunt

Overview

Two women, two directions: one dark, extraordinary day.
Meet Ottie Lee Henshaw, a startling, challenging beauty in small-town Indiana. Quick of mind, she navigates a stifling marriage, a lecherous boss, and on one day in the summer of 1930 an odyssey across the countryside to witness a dark and fearful celebration.
Meet Calla Destry, a determined young woman desperate to escape the violence of her town and to find the lover who has promised her a new life.
On this day, the countryside of Jim Crow-era Indiana is no place for either. It is a world populated by frenzied demagogues and crazed revelers, by marauding vigilantes and grim fish suppers, by possessed blood hounds and, finally, by the Ku Klux Klan itself. Reminiscent of the works of Louise Erdrich, Edward P. Jones, and Marilynne Robinson, The Evening Road is the story of two remarkable women on the move through an America riven by fear and hatred, and eager to flee the secrets they have left behind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316268325
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. A 2024 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, he is also the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. Hunt’s reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

What People are Saying About This

bestselling author of THE LIFEBOAT and NOW AND AGAIN - Charlotte Rogan

"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."

author of international bestsellers WOLF HALL and BRING UP THE BODIES - Hilary Mantel

"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"

National Book Award winning author of THE WOMAN WHO LOST HER SOUL - Bob Shacochis

"No need to overheat the superlatives with Laird Hunt. The plain and simple truth is, he's never written a novel that hasn't dazzled me, and when it comes to THE EVENING ROAD, no one's written quite this way since Flannery O' Conner."

Editorial Reviews

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.

bestselling author of The Boys in The Boat Daniel James Brown

Laird Hunt is one of our great literary stylists.

WYSO's Book Nook

Not since Miss Jane Pittman have I encountered such strong and admirable characters as Laird Hunt's Ottie Lee Henshaw and Calla Destry. In The Evening Road, Hunt shows us how love and kindness can and ultimately will prevail over misogyny and racial injustice. This dramatic story of one horrific day in Middle America a century ago is as relevant to our own era as the intolerance, latent and otherwise, that still characterizes all levels of our society. The Evening Road is both a major literary achievement and a timely and inspiring story in these troubles, latter days.

author of A Stranger In The Kingdom Howard Frank Mosher

Hunt's new book raises his own high bar further with an almost fablelike view of prejudice and cruelty some 60 years after emancipation... 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. Hunt brings to mind Flannery O'Connor's grotesques and Barry Hannah's bracingly inventive prose and cranks. He is strange, challenging, and a joy to read.

Kirkus (starred review)

[The Evening Road] illuminates its time better than any staid sepia period piece ever could.

Vulture

The book is at once disturbing, highly imaginative and evocative, a tale that is likely to occupy your thoughts well after you close the cover.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

[Hunt's] books share a richness of language and a vividness of imagery that can seriously blow the mind.

Bookpage

The Evening Road is a sad and raucous story, ugly and beautiful at once, evocatively starring two very different women.

Shelf Awareness

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.

bestselling author of Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel

A strange, dazzling novel, as audacious as it is lyrical, The Evening Road hauls up insight, sorrow, and even-somehow-wit from the well of American history.

bestselling author of Room and The Wonder Emma Donoghue

The three loosely related novels Laird Hunt has published since 2012-Kind One, Neverhome, and The Evening Road-are perhaps my favorite body of work by an American author. The Evening Road is difficult subject matter-its story revolves around a historical lynching in Indiana-but its two women narrators are both intensely memorable characters, and through them Hunt deftly explores both the present evils and the possible grace of humanity.—Matt Bell, New York

From the Publisher

Magnificent.”

author of the New York Trilogy Paul Auster

★ 2016-10-19
In 1920 Indiana, a threatened lynching becomes a magnet for two women navigating different physical and emotional paths in this engrossing work."You are speaking in originalities," says the heroine of Hunt's previous novel (Neverhome, 2014, etc.). The line applies as well to the book's well-crafted writing, rich plot, and doughty lead, a woman disguised as a man in the Union Army during the Civil War. Hunt's new book raises his own high bar further with an almost fablelike view of prejudice and cruelty some 60 years after emancipation. He calls whites cornsilks and blacks cornflowers, so the lynching stems from this allegation: "Some cornflowers shot a cornsilk and set a hundred houses on fire." The cornsilks head for the town of Marvel expecting to enjoy a "rope party." One group's adventures along the way are narrated by Ottie Lee Henshaw, secretary to a businessman and wife to Dale, owner of a massive pig. They get a flat tire, commandeer a mule-drawn wagon, visit a church supper and a prayer meeting, and find out more about themselves than they expected. The book's second big section is narrated by Calla Destry, a tough teenage cornflower orphan who has been taken in by a local black couple and then, in other ways, by a smooth-talking cornsilk. That's the man Calla sets out to find because she's in trouble. Her meanderings occupy roughly the same time frame as the first half, while her different route intersects the others' in intriguing ways. The split-screen view highlights and breaches the racial divide. The lynching remains mostly offstage. 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. Hunt brings to mind Flannery O'Connor's grotesques and Barry Hannah's bracingly inventive prose and cranks. He is strange, challenging, and a joy to read.

Kirkus Reviews