Private Way - (Flyover Fiction) by Ladette Randolph (Paperback)

About the Book

After being cyber-bullied, the founder of a successful social media platform leaves Southern California for Lincoln, Nebraska. With the help of her neighbors and Willa Cather's novels, she finds something she hadn't known she was searching for.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2023 Nebraska Book Award

In 2015, when cyberbullies disrupt her life in Southern California, Vivi Marx decides to cut her cord with the internet and take her life offline for a year. She flees to the one place where she felt safe as a child--with her grandmother in Lincoln, Nebraska. Nevermind that her grandmother is long dead and she doesn't know anyone else in the state. Even before she meets her new neighbors on Fieldcrest Drive, Vivi knows she's made a terrible mistake, but every plan she makes to leave is foiled. Despite her efforts to outrun it, trouble follows her to Nebraska, just not in the ways she'd feared. With the help of her neighbors, Willa Cather's novels, and her own imagination, Vivi finds something she hadn't known she was searching for.

Review Quotes

"A wonderfully wise, vividly written, and deeply absorbing novel that delves into Willa Cather's question about what is required of 'a civilized society.' By turns funny, reflective, and harrowing . . . Private Way is that rare novel that acknowledges the real hazards of civic life while also celebrating its transformative power."--Suzanne Berne, author of The Dogs of Littlefield: A Novel

"In richly evocative prose Ladette Randolph describes the triumphs and failures of Vivi's new life offline. With its complicated characters and lovely evocations of Nebraska, Private Way is a surprising and utterly absorbing novel."--Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field

"Ladette Randolph carefully attends to quiet revelations. As with her previous evocative work, the seeming periphery of Nebraska centers the story as the state continues to transform, in unexpected places, for those who take the time to look."--Gretchen E. Henderson, author of The House Enters the Street

"Vivi's wished-for privacy is challenged by a community teeming with unforgettable characters. . . . Here, in the company of the novels of Willa Cather, Vivi endures a record-setting Nebraska winter that challenges her to abandon her usual mode of evasion and secrecy. And therein lies the heart of Private Way."--Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications: New and Selected Stories

About the Author

Ladette Randolph is the editor in chief of Ploughshares magazine and is distinguished publisher-in-residence at Emerson College. She is the author of several books, including This is Not the Tropics (Nebraska, 2022), Haven's Wake (Bison Books, 2013), A Sandhills Ballad (Bison Books, 2011), and Leaving the Pink House.