Description

‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy’ – The New York Times

Part Southern Gothic, part gritty Western, Walk Me to the Distance is a haunting journey into the American badlands. Percival Everett brings this harsh landscape to life, showing a world where cruelty is a way of life.

David Larson can never go home.

His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won’t even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he breaks down in the nowhere town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming.

There he finds lodging with Chloe Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their unconventional family is complete when Larson takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at the highway rest stop where he works, but at the edge of this tableau lingers the unmistakable spectre of violence.

Part of the Picador Collection showcasing the best of modern literature.

Publisher Review

Everett's story has violence and pathos, but it is really his terse writing that makes the novel potent. The silences between his taciturn Western characters, like the time bending in good jazz, are loaded with meaning. His characters, alternately pitiful and admirable, are both convincing and memorable . . . This novel is like a winter in Slut's Hole: unsettling, harsh, and ultimately unforgettable * People * Everett manages to tell a great deal about one man's moral dilemma and cluttered path to repatriation. The note of hope on which this moving story ends, though tentative, is fully deserved * Publishers Weekly * American literature's philosopher king - and its sharpest satirist * The New Yorker * Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy * The New York Times * It's about time this extraordinary writer got some credit this side of the Pond * The Sunday Times *