My Sunshine Away - Hardcover

Walsh, M.O.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241011884 ISBN 13: 9780241011881

Publisher: Viking, 2015

Synopsis

My Sunshine Away is an extraordinary debut novel from M. O. Walsh, a dazzling new literary voice.

Welcome to Woodland Hills, Louisiana: a place of lush, sweltering summers, neighbourhood cookouts in every backyard and vats of chilled beer under the crepe myrtles. A terrible crime is just about to take place...

One day Lindy Simpson cycles home from school and straight into a trap: someone is lying in wait for her, a wire strung between lampposts blocking the path. She is raped just yards from her front door. No one sees a thing and the perpetrator is not caught.

Her fourteen year old neighbour has cherished a crush on Lindy, the ultimate girl next door, since they were kids. After her assault he becomes determined to solve the crime, investigating each suspect in the neighbourhood. But before this long, hot summer is out, it will become clear that the friendly community of Woodland Hills has much to hide.

Behind every white picket fence in suburbia lies a tangled web of darkness. In his zeal to solve the mystery, the teenage detective stumbles across a sinister world he doesn't recognise, drawing ever closer to a terrifying denouement.

My Sunshine Away is an extraordinary debut novel from a unique new literary voice. Childhood in small-town America is filled with dreamy, technicolour days of innocence, but beneath the homely comforts and familiarity, this world is rotten to its very core. For every fan of The Lovely Bones and The Virgin Suicides comes a new and haunting tale of disturbance in suburbia.

About this title

About the Author

M. O. Walsh grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has written for Oxford American and The New York Times and his stories have been anthologized in Best New American Voices and Bar Stories. He currently teaches English at the University of New Orleans. My Sunshine Away is his first novel.

From the Back Cover

There were four suspects in the crime that occurred directly on the sidewalk of Piney Creek Road. It was a crime impossible during the daylight, when we neighborhood kids would have been tearing around in go-karts, coloring chalk figures on our driveways, or chasing snakes down into storm gutters. But, at night the streets of Woodland Hills sat empty and quiet, except for the pleasure of frogs greeting the mosquitoes that rose in squadrons from the swamps behind our properties.

I should tell you now that I was one of the suspects.

Hear me out.

Let me explain.

[gap before quote below]

'This is literature of the highest order. The book snaps with the tautness of a thriller... We need more novelists with the guts and clarity of M.O. Walsh.' Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves

From the Inside Flap

'I should tell you now that I was one of the suspects.
Hear me out.
Let me explain . . .'

One hot evening in early summer, 1989, fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson cycles home through the wide, empty streets of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her hometown is a place of cookouts on sweltering afternoons, iced tea and cauldrons of spicy crawfish, crepe myrtle trees heavy with red and purple blossoms. Lindy is just yards from her parents' house when she is knocked to the sidewalk and attacked.

No one saw anything - they were indoors, escaping the sticky heat, the mosquitoes. The police draw a blank and the community does its best to move on.

But one fourteen-year-old boy is sure there are answers still waiting to be found - out there on the swept and empty porches, by the lawns steaming in the early morning sun, under the newly broken street lamp. Secretly in love with Lindy and fascinated by her ordeal, he is drawn onward in a search for truths that may be better left buried...

Acutely wise and deeply honest, My Sunshine Away is a mesmerizing journey through the final days of childhood. M. O. Walsh spins a haunting tale of Southern suburbia, where innocence is fleeting, deceptive and all too easily corrupted.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0241011884
• ISBN 13: 9780241011881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304