Overview

Wyatt W. Sallow, MBA—poet, business ethics professor, and coach of the 8th ranked collegiate chess team in East Texas—travels to the heart of northern England to trace his family origins in mundane Sallowsfield, only to find his supposed ancestry a mirage. He does have a real past, however: one that stalks him across the green hillsides in echoes of his catastrophic marriage, the lingering shadow of a lost child, and—there, in person, inexplicably emerging from the town’s faux-Victorian train station—“X,” the enigmatic object of his unrequited passion and a figure as perplexing as an algebraic variable. On his eight-day tour/pilgrimage/mock epic journey, Wyatt pursues the specter of his lost love and crosses paths with the citizens of this down-at-its-heels market town as they struggle to grasp the all-consuming obsessions, ghosts, and X-factors that confound their days. Thought-provoking yet dryly humorous, Sallowsfield weaves diverse elements into a story both light-hearted and philosophical, exploring along the way universal human touchstones of obsession, ruined love and the inexplicable mysteries that shape our lives.

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9781680033571

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"""From the moment Cliff Hudder's characters enter his novel, you have the sense that the author is not so much writing about them as introducing them to you; that they are real citizens wandering around the town of Sallowsfield and living their real lives. He portrays them with insight, a deep awareness of their desires and struggles, and a benign tolerance for their inevitable failings. By the time you finish this book, you'll know these people like your own relatives. Or maybe even better."" --Elizabeth Crook, author of The Which Way Tree, The Night Journal, Monday, Monday and The Madstone--Elizabeth Crook ""From the Pantheon of Picaresques stumbles Wyatt Sallow on his Pilgrimage to Sallowsfield. His Quest--for X, Y, and Z--is the Quest of the Great Wanderers--Todd Andrews in The Floating Opera, Binx Bolling in The Vieux Carr�, and Leopold Bloom in 'The Lotus Eaters.' And as we accompany him on his sallow search, we both recognize and discover ourselves."" --Glenn Blake, author of Drowned Moon, Return Fire, and The Old and the Lost--Glenn Blake ""With hints of Lodge's Campus Trilogy, Joyce's Ulysses, and even Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Sallowsfield deftly and repeatedly defies expectations. Hudder arranges a meta chessboard and moves his characters with the sure hand of a master storyteller. You're going to fall as hard as I did for his imperfect hero and the misshapen figures he meets in the wonderfully drawn, bizarre world of Sallowsfield."" --David Samuel Levinson, author of Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, and Tell Me How This Ends Well--David Samuel Levinson ""Wyatt Sallow travels to the town of Sallowsfield in the United Kingdom in search of himself, modest fame, family history, and possible and imagined loves. Cliff Hudder has created a funny, hapless, befuddled, and creepy character in a sprawling novel that will surprise and entertain you about what we seek at middle-age, what confuses us, and what consumes us as we try to turn a 'will to lose' into a quiet victory."" --Sergio Troncoso, author of Nobody's Pilgrims, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, and From This Wicked Patch of Dust--Sergio Troncoso"

Author Information

Cliff Hudder teaches at Lone Star College-Montgomery in Conroe, Texas, and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2017.

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