The Rhythm of the Road
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The mesmerizing debut novel about driving trucks, loving music, and growing up.
A truck driver's daughter who grows up in the front seat of her father's truck, Jo shares her father's love of country music, junk food, and the open highway. Jo's life is a perfect slice of Americana, except that their "open road" is in England, and her father--the gentle, melancholy Bobby Pickering--is from Northern Ireland. The only truly American thing about Jo is her mother, whom she has never met.
Jo is twelve when she and Bobby pick up hitchhiker Cosima Stewart, an American country singer whose band is touring England. They become dedicated fans, and Cosima, touched by the unlikely duo, comes to regard Jo with an indulgent, even sisterly, eye.
But when Jo is sixteen, Bobby sinks into serious despair and Jo seeks refuge in Cosima and the band. When Bobby disappears, Jo's adoration becomes obsessive as she follows her idol all to the way to California. Here, in the sweltering Mohave Desert and alone for the first time, Jo must face the painful truths of her own life, the mother she has never known, and the father she can't force from her mind. With shades of Zadie Smith and Mark Haddon, Albyn Leah Hall's powerful debut is a page-turning study of what frightens us about one another and ourselves; of how we run away and what we can't, ultimately, escape from.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Raised on the road, Josephine Pickering loves her truck-driving daddy, Bobby, even though his sometimes-dark moods make him go silent. The only parent she's ever known (her mother abandoned the family shortly after Jo's premature birth), he lives and breathes country music and takes her with him on his truck routes though the U.K. where he picks up pretty hitchhikers, like singer Cosima Stewart. Jo, now a teenager, is discovering her sexuality and her independence, which isn't the easiest thing to do without a mother. She nurtures an infatuation with Cosima and her band, gets Bobby to take her to their shows and glows under their kindly attentions. When Bobby bottoms out the day after Jo loses her virginity to Cosima's boyfriend, Jo falls apart: she follows Cosima to California and spirals dangerously out of control. Her crackup, though, has its bonuses. Despite her violent outbursts, Jo is never malicious, and her most shocking acts are, in the end, a cry for love and for help. With its echoes of memories, country music and the love between a father and a daughter, Hall's debut manages to be both poignant and unsettling.
