Highway Blue

In the lonely, beat-up town of San Padua, Anne Marie can never get the sound of the ocean out of her head. And it’s here—dog-walking by day, working bars by night—where she tries to forget about her ex-husband, Cal: both their brief marriage and their long estrangement.

But when Cal shows up on Anne Marie’s doorstep one day, he upends her world once again. A gun goes off in a violent accident, hurling the two of them on the road in escape.

Through sweaty motel rooms and dark parking lots full of whiskey-soaked souls and fair-weather friends, Anne Marie sifts through the consequences of their crime. But this is also her search for love, in all its broken forms, and how the pursuit of love is, in turn, a kind of redemption.

Written in spare, shimmering prose, Highway Blue is a novel of being lost and found across a vast, mythical American landscape, and a moving look at life on society’s margins. With all the grace of a latter-day Denis Johnson, it introduces an electrifyingly singular and brilliant new voice.