Highway Blue
the must-read modern-day Bonnie and Clyde story of summer 2022
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
'Holds you captive like a blues song' Olivia Sudjic
In San Padua you can never get the ocean out of your brain.
Anne Marie's husband Cal left her on their first anniversary. Two years later and she is still adrift, living a precarious life of shift work and shared apartments.
When he shows up on the doorstep, clearly in trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in an alley near the shore and the young couple flee together, crammed into a beat-up car with their broken past, desperate to fill their lives on this long stretch of road under hot skies.
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PRAISE FOR HIGHWAY BLUE
'Poignant, moving and cinematic' An Yu
'Beautiful' Observer
'Unforgettable' Elaine Feeney
'Gripping' Stylist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McFarlane's dreamy if tepid debut follows a young couple on the run from the police in a cinematically rendered American West. In the forlorn seaside city of San Padua, 21-year-old narrator Anne Marie barely scrapes by as a bartender and dog-walker, while trying to shake off memories of her older ex-husband, Cal, a drifter and grifter who disappeared in the middle of the night a year into their marriage. When Cal looks up Anne Marie one evening, she is suddenly thrust back into his chaotic orbit. After a man confronts Cal over money owed to him, the three fight and the man's gun goes off, killing him. Anne Marie and Cal then flee and embark on an expansive, circuitous road trip. McFarlane's burnished prose is steeped in the hard-edged funk of dirty realism ("Outstretched hands waved and pushed crumpled bills at me and I pulled pints and gave them out sticky-handed"), but Anne Marie's character remains frustratingly oblique. Vague memories emerge of Anne Marie's troubled relationship with her mother, who died when Anne Marie was 15, rendering her protagonist's hard-knock life through painful flashes that contribute to the mood but fail to illuminate. Though the novel aptly captures the characters' sense of aimlessness, it loses its own way.