The Evening Road - by Laird Hunt (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Two women, two secrets: one desperate and extraordinary day. In the high heat of an Indiana summer, news spreads fast. When Marvel, the local county seat, plans to lynch three young black men, word travels faster. It is August, 1930, the height of the Jim Crow era, and the prospect of the spectacle sends shockwaves rumbling through farm country as far as a day's wagon-ride away.

Ottie Lee Henshaw, a fiery small-town beauty, sets out with her lecherous boss and brooding husband to join in whatever fun there is to be had. At the opposite end of the road to Marvel, Calla Destry, a young African-American woman determined to escape the violence, leaves home to find the lover who has promised her a new life.

As the countryside explodes in frenzied revelry, the road is no place for either. It is populated by wild-eyed demagogues, marauding vigilantes, possessed bloodhounds, and even 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 woman on the move through an America riven by fear and hatred, and eager to flee the secrets they have left behind.

Review Quotes

"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."--Hilary Mantel, bestselling author of Wolf Hall

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

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

"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."--Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Room and The Wonder

"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)

"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."--Howard Frank Mosher, author of A Stranger In The Kingdom

"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

"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

"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."--Daniel James Brown, bestselling author of The Boys in The Boat

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.