Cal ran out on Anne Marie two years ago so she is surprised to find him on her doorstep. Cal is no good for Anne Marie but she doesn't realise that she deserves better.
Cal is in trouble. He owes money to some bad hombres and pretty soon, he and Anne Marie have to leave town. They travel south and their road trip is very evocative. Cal is a charmer with no prospects. Anne Marie has lurched from one bad situation to another and accepted them as her due.
This is one story about the journey rather than the destination.

This was a readable and atmospheric novella following the damaged Anne Marie as she unwittingly goes on a road trip with her estranged husband Cal after they inadvertently find themselves in a tricky situation.

They meet some random people on the way and the reader gets a brief insight into their lives, and simultaneously get to know Anne Marie a bit better too.

I enjoyed the setting and the atmosphere of the book, but there wasn't very much to it overall. Anne Marie is quite a passive narrator and just seems to go along with everything, and she didn't seem a very strong character, although we did come to understand her more as the novel progressed. And I did like the ending.

Highway Blue is a short novel, maybe even more of a novella, where the emphasis is not so much on action, but on emotion and thoughts.

Anne-Marie married Cal at 19 and he left her without warning a year later. When he unexpectedly shows up two years later, afraid and owing money she is less than happy to see him. But a violent altercation leads to them having to go on the run together, and it's on this journey that we learn more about Anne-Marie and her feelings of emptiness that have guided her choices. There is still clearly feelings between her and Cal, but neither is open to expressing them.

I'm not as a rule a big fan of short stories, as I like to delve deeper into a plot. But I found this surprisingly mesmerising. It did however feel like it had potential for so much more, and did end quite abruptly. But perhaps this is the way of novellas, where it is the reader who gets to decide where they think the story goes.

Very good. Hadn't known much about it or the author but a very enjoyable, assured read. Interesting to see what she writes next

Anne Marie married Cal at age 19 and a year to the day later he walked out. It was unannounced though, as we’ll learn later, not totally unexpected. In the two years that have since passed she’s lived with four girls who aren’t her friends and scraped up enough money to survive by tending bar and walking other people’s dogs. Then Cal reappears, he’s in trouble and about to draw Anne Marie in neck deep too.

A violent encounter with a money lender who’s come to collect a debt sends them both scurrying out of town. They manage to hitchhike their way to a friend of Cal’s from whom they scrounge a beat up old car. They’re on the run but unsure where they’re going. And as they travel Anne Marie, through whose eyes we view this story, starts to unpick her thoughts about her marriage, her previous life with a mother who died when she was fifteen years old and on this reacquaintance with Cal.

Set in a mythical place that might somewhere in the American West, this is largely a road trip tale with the pair heading in a southerly direction towards the place Anne Marie’s mother was born. Tight for money they sleep in the car or cadge a sofa when they can, meeting a ragtag group of people as they go.

The tone of the whole thing is pretty dark, the atmosphere threatening and dingy throughout. The writing is sparse and, in truth, the plotline is pretty thin too. The attraction, then, is in the writing and the characterisation – particularly of Anne Marie, who I liked a lot. There are some great descriptions of places and people here and some memorable lines as Ann Marie ruminates on her life and the people she’s been close to, particularly Cal.

This first book by a new young writer shows talent and promise. I suspect she’ll write better books in time, but I think this one is still worth catching. Three and a half stars rounded up to four, for me.

Anne Marie and Cal got married young; she was just nineteen, he a few years older. A year later, he walked out one morning, leaving Anne Marie to an aimless life of bar work, shared apartments and one night stands.
Two years later, he shows up out of the blue, trying to put things right, but he brings trouble with him, and the couple are soon on the run, taking the Highway Blue in search of love and belonging.



Highway Blue is a short novel (less than 200 pages), but a compelling, memorable one.

Despite the violence that sets Anne Marie and Cal on the run, the book isn't plot-driven as such - this isn't the sort of road trip that involves fast car chases or the encountering of odd people or unusual places. Instead, as they travel south by car and hitch-hiking back to the town where Anne Marie was born, she journeys back though her life, not nostalgically but in an attempt to understand herself and the position she finds herself in now.

It's beautifully written, told by Anne Marie in the first person, with a haunting, yearning quality. With her, the reader dips back into her childhood and her realtionship with her mother, experiences her all consuming but brief love for Cal, and shares her hunger for something better than she's known so far.

A remarkably accomplished debut novel. It’s the story of Anne Marie and her husband Cal, the husband who walked out on her after just one year of marriage, leaving her lost and adrift. Then 2 years later he suddenly turns up again out of the blue, but their reunion has an unexpected and unwelcome result. I found the book haunting and compelling, a dark and gritty tale of two young people at odds with their lives and circumstances. In calm and measured prose, the author describes their plight and the landscape they move through without melodrama or unnecessary exposition but vividly and with empathy. An unusual and moving coming-of-age story.

This feels like an incredibly predictable style over substance piece of work. It reads like something from a creative writing seminar. I'm sorry to be so harsh but this needed a lot of work. The author's prose is unconvincing.

A good read, it’s fast paced so a good page turner. You follow Anne Marie as she reflects on the past with her ex husband Cal whilst they race away from the present. It’s a coming of age story for Anne Marie where she has to make some decisions for her future to move on and leave the past behind her.

It's atmospheric, gritty and well written but not a lot happen and it's' one those case "It's me not the book".
I will try to re-read it in the future, it's not my cup of tea now.
Many thanks the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinons are mine

In the lonely 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. When Cal shows up on Anne Marie's doorstep one day, clearly in trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in a violent accident and the young couple are forced to hit the open road together to escape.

This book is different. Well written, full of great imagery...My only complaint was that it ended too quickly....McFarlane is a very talented writer. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5/5.

I was sent a copy of Highway Blue by Ailsa McFarlane to read and review by NetGalley. I found this to be quite a melancholic novel, leaning as it did towards the negative aspects of protagonist Anne Marie’s life. The prose is incredibly descriptive, though not at all in a flowery way. Rather more matter of fact, which is totally in keeping with the book as a whole. I can’t say that I loved it but I didn’t dislike it either, which is why I have chosen to give it 3 stars, though perhaps it actually merits being closer to 4.

I enjoyed this short road-trip read, but although it was atmospheric it didn't seem substantial enough for a full novel. The mood was melancholy and reflective, rather than pacy. I liked the characters of Anne Marie and her on-again-off-again husband Cal, but kept getting distracted by being unable to place them geographically or historically.

A pleasant mood piece, but not wholly satisfying for me.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

There is something almost mesmerising in this short novel, in its quiet beauty. Perhaps it's the recurrence of the colour blue, of the ocean, of the sunsets, the heat and the long road stretching in front of the characters. Highway Blue is the story of two small people, who meet other small people on the road and listen to their own small stories. It feels universal. I was struck by the book's melancholy, and finished it wishing that, whatever happened next to them, everything would be okay for both Anne Marie and Cal.

Highway Blue is a short novel but it packs a punch. Anne Marie is leading an aimless life after her husband left her 2 years earlier. He suddenly turns up on her doorstep leading to a violent encounter which sends the estranged couple on the run.
The novel is told in the first person by Anne Marie as she and Cal travel away from San Padua. The language and descriptions are rich and evocative and the memories she recounts of her childhood and her brief marriage vividly explain the woman she has become. There is little in the way of actual story but somehow the novel draws you in to Anne Marie’s life. I loved it, it is an unusual book but one that will stay with me for a long time. I look forward to reading more from Ailsa McFarlane.
Thank you #netgalley and #penguinrandom for inviting me to review this ARC

I so wanted to like this book. I enjoyed the style of writing, I just didn’t find the story very interesting and I wasn’t bothered about what happened to the characters. It’s basically a look into the life of Anne Marie and what happens when her husband Cal comes back on the scene. I’m sure it will appeal to some folks, we are all different, this one just wasn’t for me. Thank you #netgalley

This feels like a mood piece to me, a long short story or novella that captures a feeling of rootlessness and melancholy, a drifting, lulling dip into twisted romance and edgy on-the-run narrative. The physical journey which is also a psychological journey is such an archetype that this feels overly familiar and the decision not to anchor it in real places adds to a slightly surreal feel. All the same, this is relatively slight and while there's a kind of doomed romance at heart, the protagonist's reckoning with her past, her abbreviated marriage and her life still feels unresolved. A bit Thelma and Louise, albeit with a M/F couple; a tiny bit Cormac McCarthy - I'm not sure the author has quite found her own subject yet.

A great debut. Fabulous characters and a dramatic plot which looks at contemporary issues of coercion and violence wth real depth

“Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night
The first one's named sweet Anne Marie and she's my hearts delight
The second one is prison, babe, the sheriff's on my trail
And if he catches up with me, I'll spend my life in jail”

I first came across this novel on the Guardian’s best debut novelists of 2021 feature – which last year featured Douglas Stuart (who went on to win the Booker) and this year featured a number of excellent debuts I have already read including two books which have been longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize: Caleb Azumah Nelson, Rebecca Watson; the outstanding debut by Natasha Brown; as well as Megan Nolan and Abigail Dean.

The author describes the book well as “a novel about outsiders, love and loneliness, and the desire for a sense of belonging”, and a novel which takes the American road trip novel genre (one which is partly autobiographical for her, having dropped out of Vet studies in the UK to return to the US of her birth for a road trip) and “plays around within it, to put my own spin on it. I also like a slightly raw, ragged and offbeat feel.”

This book – a short novella easily read in a couple of sittings, is narrated by the young Anne Marie. At the book’s opening she is living a rather aimless life in the fictional coastal town of San Padua, where she was abandoned a few years back after a brief marriage to Cal. To her surprise he shows up on her doorstep one day, and over a drink tries and fails to get some money from her to help with some troubles he has got into further North. Walking back, his troubles catch up with him and in a fracas the gun held by Cal’s assailant goes off, and realising they face a murder charge Cal and the reluctant Ann Marie head South, sometimes hitching lifts sometimes in a beat up car.

Their journey takes them through a landscape and regions which are simultaneously evocative but also indeterminate. The author has called it an “almost mythological” version of America

It seems to me to capture the way in which both Cal and Ann Marie, in their own way, are searching for something (home, roots, a sense of belonging, a fixed identity, meaning) that they have never really had and perhaps will never find.

Cal comments, in one of the rare insights into his true feeling and the fears that lie behind his easy going confidence and bluster: “I have this feeling, this smothering feeling, and it’s pressing on me all the time and it’s like I’m burning up against the whole world and the only way to escape it is to move, to keep moving so it doesn’t catch up with me.”

Ann Marie by contrast seems to be fleeing from bodily existence, or perhaps more trying to find evidence to reconcile external corporeality “somehow I was very aware of my skin stretching over the bones of my face and I could almost feel it, that tension, and I could feel, too, the separation of me, of my bony gray body alone on a reflected field of white tiles and I felt the space around me with no one else there to break it. I seemed so odd, a small odd construction of white bone and slick red muscle and nameless yellow sludge all tied up with sinews and tendons and packaged mechanically to stand or fall.” with her inner world of feeling and need for connection, a connection she thought she had found in Cal only to realise she had not “A few years later I met Cal and decided to align the course of my happiness with him and that was that …. I thought he would stop me from being alone in my own head. I pinned that expectation on another collection of cells who was just as lost and hopeless and confused at finding themselves in the unexpected state of being conscious as I was. And in there was my mistake, my huge steaming train wreck ….. I used to believe that we, a little fringed- off species, isolated lumbering hunks of flesh, could truly know one another purely and selflessly. Whatever that was supposed to mean”

We get glimpses of both their upbringings marked by death of parents – parents who themselves seemed to represent a life that their children rejected but without really knowing how to replace it; and of their brief marriage based it seems more on impulse, and a desire to escape than on any sense of love or shared purpose – and which inevitably finished as easily as it began.

A couple of times lyric extracts come to Ann Marie’s mind - which with some Googling I found were from Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” – which I assume (given the verse with which I open my review – lyrics featured in the novel) stands as a coda for the novel (and gives the narrator her name).

Overall a promising debut novel - 3.5 rounded up

Anne Marie has been adrift since the death of her mother when she was a teenager. Not getting on with her aunt, she moves out and quickly meets and marries restless Cal, who leaves her after just one year of marriage. Devastated, she lives a half-life in a shared apartment with a dead-end job, until one night Cal arrives at her door, in debt and looking for money. Trouble follows him and the couple are jumped by an armed man, but it is he who ends up dead in an alley as the ill-fated couple go on the run across America to a place Anne Marie connects with her lost childhood. This is a very atmospheric novella, economical but very sensual in its descriptions. It reads like a fever dream as the couple travel, through hitching or by battered old car, in intense heat, eating from gas stations and living rough. The people they meet are seen through vivid snapshots. Anne Marie is forced to confront her feelings for Cal, and also to be reconciled with her past, while being haunted by the life that was taken, and on this journey she must decide what will be the way forward for her. A quick read, but one with depth and heart.