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 author’s young stepbrother.

 

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.

Flying Shoes
by Lisa Howorth

• Publication Date: April 14, 2015
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• ISBN-10: 162040303X
• ISBN-13: 9781620403037