The Evening Road, Laird Hunt
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The Evening Road

Author: Laird Hunt

Narrator: Laird Hunt

Unabridged: 6 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/07/2017


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.

Author Bio

Laird Hunt is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and translator from the French. A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, he has won the Anisfield­-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge prize. His reviews and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He teaches at Brown University and lives in Providence.

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