Two couples — businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife, Carole Ridingham; his partner, Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth Farr — have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter, Susan, who lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr's journal, and a young vagrant who has taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge.

"Entrancing . . . every sentence uncoils with supple grace."

"Davis's approach to novel-writing is so original, and the results so

magical, that trying to review her fiction in a thousand words on a

tight deadline feels . . . doomed."

"Kathryn Davis is brilliant." --Penelope Fitzgerald

"I cannot say how much I admire Kathryn Davis and her latest triumph,

THE WALKING TOUR. The book is so beautifully written it takes one's

breath away — brilliant in every way, and often delightfully funny."

-- Sigrid Nunez

-- Sigrid Nunez

brilliant in every way, and often delightfully funny.

By turns dazzling and as dark, as risky and entrancing as the landscape it describes, "The Walking Tour" is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce, telling the story of a fatal accident which occurs during a walking tour in Wales.

Kathryn Davis is the recipient of a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and the 1999 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Davis teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and lives with her husband and daughter in Vermont.