My Sunshine Away - Couverture souple

Walsh, M.O.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 024100408X ISBN 13 : 9780241004081

Editeur : Penguin Books Ltd, 2016

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

My Sunshine Away is an extraordinary debut novel from M. O. Walsh, a dazzling new literary voice. Welcome to Woodland Hills, Louisiana: a place of lush, sweltering summers, neighbourhood cookouts in every backyard and vats of chilled beer under the crepe myrtles. A terrible crime is just about to take place...One day Lindy Simpson cycles home from school and straight into a trap: someone is lying in wait for her, a wire strung between lampposts blocking the path. She is raped just yards from her front door. No one sees a thing and the perpetrator is not caught.Her fourteen year old neighbour has cherished a crush on Lindy, the ultimate girl next door, since they were kids. After her assault he becomes determined to solve the crime, investigating each suspect in the neighbourhood. But before this long, hot summer is out, it will become clear that the friendly community of Woodland Hills has much to hide.Behind every white picket fence in suburbia lies a tangled web of darkness. In his zeal to solve the mystery, the teenage detective stumbles across a sinister world he doesn't recognise, drawing ever closer to a terrifying denouement.My Sunshine Away is an extraordinary debut novel from a unique new literary voice. Childhood in small-town America is filled with dreamy, technicolour days of innocence, but beneath the homely comforts and familiarity, this world is rotten to its very core. For every fan of The Lovely Bones and The Virgin Suicides comes a new and haunting tale of disturbance in suburbia."Try and restrain yourself from flying through the pages of this wonderful novel. Instead savour this lush Louisiana mystery that takes you back to what life tasted like when you were still somewhat naïve to the ways of the world. Not just Southern but American in its vivid Baton Rouge colours and scents, treetops and grasses... The last page is as satisfying as the first. A mystery you cannot wait to solve." -Kathryn Stockett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Help"This is literature of the highest order. Although the book snaps with the tautness of a thriller, My Sunshine Away also asks essential questions, like how much responsibility we have to each other, and whether we can we ever fully reassemble the pieces of broken lives. We need more novelists with the guts and clarity of M.O. Walsh." --Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves"If you start this novel, you will not put it down. My Sunshine Away is a riveting, suspenseful, page-turning mystery. It is also a wise, insightful, and beautifully written novel. This is an extraordinary debut." --Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Life After Life"I can't praise it enough... I am swept up in the quiet beauty of the prose, and in the wisdom and compassion of the narrator. My Sunshine Away is not a thriller; it is a page turner and it's realism at its finest. It's about love, obsession, and pain. A beautiful, remarkable book. I hope M.O. Walsh writes many more." -Anne Rice, #1 bestselling author of Prince Lestat"Walsh's word-perfect rendering of the doubts, insecurities, bravado, and idealism of teens deserves to be placed in the hands of readers of Tom Franklin, Hannah Pittard, and Jeffrey Eugenides..." Booklist "My Sunshine Away is that rarest find, a page-turner you want to read slowly and a literary novel you can't look away from. At times funny, at times spine-tinglingly suspenseful, and at times wise... It's a book to read and reread. I'm already excited about M. O. Walsh's next book." -Tom Franklin, bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter "M.O. Walsh has written one of the best books I've read in a long while. An outstanding examination of the way that the past and the weight of our memories shape us... My Sunshine Away feels utterly original." -Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang"My Sunshine Away is so much more than a mystery; it's [a] love letter to youth and to possibility. This is an awe-inspiring debut, magic." -Hannah Pittard, author of Reunion and The Fates Will Find Their Way"M. O. Walsh's My Sunshine Away reminds us that art can be wrenching and a delight, that pain - if examined through wit, intimacy, and wisdom - can be a salve. This novel is great." --Darin Strauss, internationally bestselling author of Half a Life"Beautiful sentences, a mystery at the heart of the story, characters who consistently surprise... The opening grab[bed] me and the ending refuse[d] to let go. I finished reading the book both wiser and sadder than when I started."-Steve Yarbrough, author of The Realm of Last Chances"How do you explain Louisiana humidity? The slow, dull saturation that seeps through layers of one's skin? ... My Sunshine Away is the literary equivalent. M.O. Walsh reveals how one crime spills through layers of a Baton Rouge community... Only in the final pages does one feel relief like the stirrings of autumn in the deep South." -Veronica Brooks-Sigler (bookseller at Octavia Books, Louisiana)

Extrait :

There were four suspects in the rape of Lindy Simpson, a crime that occurred directly on top of the sidewalk of Piney Creek Road, the same sidewalk our parents had once hopefully carved their initials into, years before, as residents of the first street in the Woodland Hills subdivision to have houses on each lot. It was a crime impossible during the daylight, when we neighborhood kids would have been tearing around in go-karts, coloring chalk figures on our driveways, or chasing snakes down into storm gutters. But, at night the streets of Woodland Hills sat empty and quiet, except for the pleasure of frogs greeting the mosquitoes that rose in squadrons from the swamps behind our properties.

On this particular evening, however, in the dark turn beneath the first busted streetlight in the history of Piney Creek Road, a man, or perhaps a boy, stood holding a long piece of rope. He tied one end of this rope to the broken light pole next to the street and wrapped the other around his own hand. Thinking himself unseen, he then crawled into the azalea bushes beside Old Man Casemore’s house, the rope lagging in shadow behind him like a tail, where he perhaps practiced, once or twice, pulling the rope taut and high across the sidewalk. And then this man, or this boy, knowing the routine of the Simpson girl, waited to hear the rattle of her banana-seated Schwinn coming around the curve.

You should know:

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a hot place.

Even the fall of night offers no comfort. There are no breezes sweeping off the dark servitudes and marshes, no cooling rains.

Instead, the rain that falls here survives only to boil on the pavement, to steam up your glasses, to burden you. So this man, or this boy, was undoubtedly sweating as he crouched in the bushes, undoubtedly eaten alive by insects. They gnash you here. They cover you. And so it is not a mistake to wonder if he might have been dissuaded from this violence had he lived in a more merciful place. It is important, I believe, when you think back about a man or a boy in the bushes, to wonder if maybe one soothing breeze would have calmed him, would have softened his mood, would have changed his mind.

But it did not.

So the act took place in darkness, in near silence, in heat, and Lindy Simpson remembered little other than the sudden appearance of a rope in front of her bicycle, the sharp pull of its braid across her chest. Months later, and after much therapy, she would also recall how the bicycle rode on without her after she fell. She would remember how she never even saw it tip over before a sock was stuffed into her mouth and her face was pushed into the lawn. The crush of weight on her back. The scrape of asphalt against her knees. She would remember these, too. Then a voice in her ear that she did not recognize.

Then a blow to the back of her head.

She was fifteen years old.

This was the summer of 1989 and no arrests were made. Don’t believe what you see on the crime shows today. No single hairs were tweezed out of Old Man Casemore’s lawn. No length of rope was sent off to a lab. No DNA was salvaged off the pebbles of our concrete. And although the people of Woodland Hills answered earnestly every question the police initially asked of them, although they tried their best to be helpful, there was no immediate evidence to speak of.

All four of these primary suspects therefore remained unofficial and uncharged, as the rape had occurred so quickly and without apparent witness that the crime scene itself began to fade the moment Lindy Simpson regained consciousness and pushed her bicycle back home that night, a place only four doors away, to lay it down in its usual spot. It faded even further as she walked through the back door of her house and climbed upstairs to her bathroom, where she showered in water of an unknown temperature.

There are times in my life when I imagine this water scalding.

Other times, frozen.

Regardless, Lindy never came down for dinner.

She was likely thought by her parents to be yapping with friends on the telephone, twirling the cord around her young fingers, until her mother, a woman named Peggy, made her evening rounds with the laundry basket. It was then she saw a pair of underpants in the bathroom, dotted with bright red blood, lying next to a single running shoe. The other shoe, a blue Reebok, was missing.

By this time, her daughter Lindy was curled in her bed and concussed.

A bed that just that morning had been a child’s.

I should tell you now that I was one of the suspects.

Hear me out.

Let me explain.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 024100408X
• ISBN 13: 9780241004081
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 304