Synopses & Reviews
Mary Byrd Thornton could understand how a reporter couldn't resist the story: a nine-year-old boy sexually molested and killed on Mother's Day, 1966. A suspect to whom nothing would stick. A neighborhood riddled with secrets. No one, especially the bungling or complicit authorities, had been able to solve the crime. Now, thirty years later, the reporters call will reel a reluctant Mary Byrd from Mississippi back to Virginia where she must confront her family — and, once again, the murder's irremovable stain of tragedy.
Lisa Howorth's remarkable Flying Shoes is a work of fiction, but the murder is based on the still-unsolved case of her stepbrother, a front page story in the Washington Post. And yet this is not a crime novel; it is an honest and luminous story of a particular time and place in the South, where even calamitous weather can be a character, everyone has a story, and all are inextricably entwined. With a flamboyant cast, splendid dark humor, a potent sense of history, and a shocking true story at its heart, Flying Shoes is a rich and candid novel from a fresh new voice about family and memory and one woman's flight from a wounded past.
Review
"Like all great stories from Mississippi, Flying Shoes never proceeds in a straight line. It twists and turns in order to notice what matters most in life, and then delivers us to exactly where we need to be. Those of us who have waited a long time for this book celebrate its arrival." Ann Patchett, author of This is the Story of a Happy Marriage and State of Wonder
Review
"Lisa Howorth's dazzling verbal wit almost stops you in your tracks while you are flying along in this delicious prose. It is a scream — also heartbreaking, saucy, sassy, poignant, and triumphant. Mary Byrd is a bold, kooky, quirky character I won't forget. It has been a long time since I read a novel with such charm, generosity, humor, daring and brillance. It is just splendid." Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and The Girl is the Blue Beret
Review
"Lisa Howorth's Flying Shoes braids a love know of new South, old South, and haunted South that catches at the reader's heart, even as the humor and sadness of her rollicking prose has us slipping off our own shoes and moving to the music in her voice. Flying Shoes is exhilarating and brave, full of love and grief and the journeys we all make from past to present." Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell and Lark and Termite
Review
"[A] buzz-worthy debut." Booklist
Review
"Howorth writes with real flair....A memorable mosaic of a place, a time and a good-hearted woman at midlife, facing crises old and new." Associated Press
Synopsis
From the cofounder of Oxford's legendary Square Books — a stunning debut novel set in Mississippi in 1996, based on the real-life, long-unsolved murder of the authors young stepbrother.
About the Author
Lisa Howorth was born in Washington, D.C., where her family has lived for four generations. In Oxford, Mississippi, she and her husband opened Square Books (
Publishers Weekly's 2013 Bookstore of the Year) in 1979 and raised their three children. She received the Governors Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1996 and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2007. Her writing has appeared in
Garden & Gun and the
Oxford American. This is her first novel.
http://www.squarebooks.com/
@SquareBooks.
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Lisa Howorth