My Sunshine Away - Hardcover

Walsh, M. O.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399169520 ISBN 13: 9780399169526

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015

Synopsis

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"A tantalizing mystery and a tender coming-of-age story...Unputdownable."—Oprah.com

In the summer of 1989, a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish, and passionate football fandom is rocked by a violent crime when fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson—free spirit, track star, and belle of the block—is attacked late one evening near her home. As the dark side of this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia is revealed, the close-knit neighborhood is irreversibly transformed.
 
In My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh brilliantly juxtaposes the enchantment of a charmed childhood with the gripping story of a violent crime, unraveling families, and consuming adolescent love. Acutely wise and deeply honest, it is an astonishing and page-turning debut about the meaning of family, the power of memory, and our ability to forgive.
 
Named A Book of the Year by NPR, The Dallas Morning News, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist

An Entertainment Weekly 'Must List' Pick 

About this title

Review:

The Amazon Debut Spotlight Selection for February 2015: After only 50 pages My Sunshine Away gave me the same feeling as other Southern novels that have long remained favorites; The Help and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, to name two. How much of our future self is shaped by our first love, our early mistakes, and trading sweet innocence for the acrid recognition of cruelty? A lot, we discover, as we ride shotgun with a narrator who was fourteen the year that a crime against the girl he loved changed him irrevocably. This coming-of-age story set in a quiet Louisiana neighborhood touched by violence is by turns suspenseful and insightful, peppered with moments like this one that I want to commit to memory: “We were all middle-to-upper-class white kids, all the products of our parents’ success, and when we played with one another at school we played in the mirror.” –Seira Wilson

About the Author:

M.O. Walsh’s fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, The Southern Review, American Short Fiction, Epoch, and Best New American Voices, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and is currently the director of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans, where he lives and works, happily, with his wife and family.

About this edition

• Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0399169520
• ISBN 13: 9780399169526
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320