Overview

As a child growing up in Depression-era rural Virginia, Eddie Alley's quiet life is rooted in the rumors of his mother's witchcraft. But when he's visited by a writer and glamorous photographer researching American folklore for the WPA, the spell of his mother's unorthodox life is violently disrupted, and Eddie is inspired to pursue a future beyond the confines of his dead-end town. He leaves for New York and becomes a television horror-movie presenter beloved for his kitschy comedy. Though expert at softening terror for his young fans, Eddie cannot escape the guilty secrets of his own childhood. When he opens his family's door to a homeless teenager working as an intern at the TV station, the boy's presence not only awakens something in Eddie, but also in his twelve-year-old daughter, Wallis, who has begun to feel a strange kinship to her notorious grandmother. As the ghost stories of one generation infiltrate the next, Wallis and Eddie grapple with the sins of the past to repair their misguided attempts at loyalty and redemption. In Witches on the Road Tonight, bestselling author Sheri Holman teases out the dark compulsions and desperate longings that blur the line between love and betrayal.

Full Product Details

9781322357188

Table of Contents

Reviews

--Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel--A Boston Globe Book of the Year--A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year--A New York Times Editors' Choice--Winner of an Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for Literary Fiction Sheri Holman has an imagination that is both capacious and meticulous, and by turns somber and antic. . . . One of the pleasures of Witches on the Road Tonight is Holman's copious knowledge of American popular cultures as they shade into American folk culture. . . . [Holman] is not exploiting the current rage for vampires, witches, and werewolves--[her] magic is homegrown and rooted in the soil. Holman's characters have bona fide issues of identity and legitimate sources of pain that magic exacerbates rather than erases. The originality here lies in the author's ability to reshuffle the materials of pop literature and contemplate them anew. . . . Holman [has] a restless adventurousness that is the mark of a born novelist, the sort of novelist who can't help writing even if the novel is dying or literary culture is evolving or apps are replacing human brains. Witches on the Road Tonight is a path into her work that beckons, with strange lights and mysterious apparitions. -- Los Angeles Review of Books Sheri Holman is a difficult writer to categorize. She can write an elegantly observant novel of domestic absurdity, and she can write a book humming with Romantic misery and ghastly horror. . . . . Holman is an original, and her literary ideas are so sublimely odd that they seem to have exited her imagination of their own free will. . . . Marvelously creepy, touching, and tender . . . Witches on the Road Tonight is about the power of narrative and its hold on us. . . . The dialect we speak now, Holman says with eloquence, humor, and urgency, is that of televised natural disaster, war, starvation. Instead of horror, we have terror. -- The New York Review of Books Undeniably impr

Author Information

Sheri Holman is the author of A Stolen Tongue, which was translated into thirteen languages; The Dress Lodger, which has sold over 300,000 copies nationally and was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the New York Public Library's Books to Remember; and The Mammoth Cheese, short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and named a San Francisco Chronicle and Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. Holman is a founding member and currently serves on the curatorial board of The Moth. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Visit Sheri's website at sheriholman.com

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available