Editions

The Evening Road

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.

Reviews

  • 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.

    Hilary Mantel

  • 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.

    Emma Donogue

  • 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.

    Clare Clark, Literary Review

  • 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

    John Burnside, Guardian

  • An astute investigation into the nature of evildoing

    Financial Times, Books of the Year

More from this Author

About the Author

Laird Hunt

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.

Laird Hunt

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