Highway Blue

by Ailsa McFarlane

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Pub Date 6 May 2021 | Archive Date 5 Jun 2021

Random House UK, Vintage | Harvill Secker

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

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Description

Featured in the Observer 10 BEST DEBUTS OF 2021
A hypnotic story of young love on the run

'I loved Highway Blue - a dark, glimmering, journey deep into modern America on a knife edge between love and dependence.' Rosie Price, author of What Red Was

'Hypnotic, stylish, cinematic: Highway Blue holds you captive like a blues song or incantation.' Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

In front of me the long length of the road wound out, wound out and wound on under hot sky. And I drove...

Anne Marie is adrift San Padua, living a precarious life of shift-work and shared apartments. Her husband Cal left her on their first anniversary and two years later, she can't move on.

When he shows up suddenly on her doorstep, clearly in some kind of trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in an alley near the shore and the young couple flee together, crammed into a beat up car with their broken past. Their ill-at-ease odyssey takes them across a shimmering American landscape and through the darker seams of the country, towards a city that may or may not represent salvation.

Highway Blue is a story of being lost and found; of love, in all its forms; and of how the pursuit of love is, in its turn, a kind of redemption.

Advance Praise

'I'm in awe of the way McFarlane uses just a few words to carve out these deeply complex characters we meet in Highway Blue. Poignant, moving, and cinematic, this is a story imbued with love and loss that feels at once distantly dreamlike and vividly recognisable' An Yu, author of Braised Pork

'I loved Highway Blue - a dark, glimmering, journey deep into modern America on a knife edge between love and dependence' Rosie Price, author of What Red Was

'Hypnotic, stylish, cinematic . . . Highway Blue holds you captive like a blues song or incantation' - Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

'Highway Blue is a beautiful, inspired rendering of the on-the-road journey. At its core is an unforgettable protagonist in Anne Marie, and with delicate strokes her world moves in and out of its scenic, and at times tense scape. This seamless work is unobtrusive but deeply effecting; an exquisite portrayal of introspection. McFarlane has written an irresistible story of love and life's meanderings. A very gifted writer, I was entranced' - Elaine Feeney, author of As You Were

'In Highway Blue, the richness and pathos of the ordinary is heightened by the private mysteries of McFarlane's innocent fugitives as they run from both the law and themselves. It is a harrowing journey, but one filled with unexpected kindnesses and the illuminating effect of transformation. I so admire it' - Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut

'If one of America's many complicated attributes is its ability to let whole lives pass without being seen, Ailsa McFarlane reminds us that language can bring these same lives into stark and penetrating relief. Highway Blue is a road novel, a love story, a coming of age, but with sentences so sharply wrought, characters so achingly precise, that it feels new and fresh and utterly alive.' - Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want

'Ailsa McFarlane's prose combines the razor sharp truth telling of Ottessa Moshfegh with the troubled heart of Raymond Carver, using plain language to conjure a shockingly intense way of seeing. I've never read anything quite like it.' - Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl