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

Review:

Gripping and wonderful, vivid and brilliant. I loved it (Emma Healey, bestselling author of Elizabeth is Missing)

Try and restrain yourself from flying through the pages of this wonderful novel. Instead savour this lush Louisiana mystery that takes you back to what life tasted like when you were still somewhat naïve to the ways of the world. Not just Southern but American in its vivid Baton Rouge colours and scents, treetops and grasses... The last page is as satisfying as the first. A mystery you cannot wait to solve. (Kathryn Stockett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Help)

I am in awe, swept up in the quiet beauty of the prose and the wisdom and compassion of the narrator. I can't praise it enough. My Sunshine Away is realism at its finest, a page turner about love, obsession, and pain. Beautiful, memorable, remarkable - I really loved this book. (Anne Rice, #1 bestselling author of 'Prince Lestat')

Insightful and enthralling, it maintains its suspense throughout (Daily Mail)

Melancholy and moving, this debut captures the challenges of adulthood and the sorrows of youth. (Sunday Express)

It's beautifully written and almost impossible to put down (Buzzfeed)

Both a tantalizing mystery and a tender coming-of-age story, My Sunshine Away is equally capable of making a reader cry and scream. Unputdownable (Oprah Magazine)

This compelling coming-of-ages story is skilfully told, and explores the failings of children and adults alike with compassion (Financial Times)

This is literature of the highest order. Although the book snaps with the tautness of a thriller, My Sunshine Away also asks essential questions, like how much responsibility we have to each other, and whether we can we ever fully reassemble the pieces of broken lives. We need more novelists with the guts and clarity of M.O. Walsh (Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves)

If you start this novel, you will not put it down. My Sunshine Away is a riveting, suspenseful, page-turning mystery. It is also a wise, insightful, and beautifully written novel. This is an extraordinary debut (Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Life After Life)

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

About this edition

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