Walk Me to the Distance

(Paperback)

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'Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy' - The New York Times 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 Chlo Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their ersatz 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. Blending the grotesquerie of the Southern Gothic with the Western's codes of frontier justice, in Walk Me to the Distance Percival Everett renders a vivid and haunting landscape of the American badlands, where cruelty is the lingua franca. Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature. Read Percival's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel James in paperback now.

Reviews

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 literatures 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 *

Author Bio

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including Telephone, Dr No, The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Erasure, which was adapted into the major Oscar-winning film American Fiction. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. An instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller in hardback, James was a finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, and was named the Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles.