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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 reporter's 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.
"The murder case remains in the background throughout most of the novel; the story is decidedly more of a character study than a page-turning thriller, but Howorth's characters are well worth getting to know." - Publishers Weekly
"[A] buzz-worthy debut." - Booklist
"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
"Lisa Howorth's dazzling verbal wit almost stops you in your tracks while you are flying along in this delicious prose." - Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and The Girl in the Blue Beret
This information about Flying Shoes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 Governor's 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.
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