Bowlaway

Description

A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the author of The Giant's House From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the beginning of the twentieth century - nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin and fifteen pounds of gold on her person - Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalises and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford's most defining landmark - with Bertha its most notable resident. She changes the town forever- her singular spirit resonating powerfully through every board and brick and bone. In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humour, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. Bowlaway is both a stunning feat of language and a brilliant unravelling of a family's myths and secrets, its passions and betrayals, and the ties that bind and the rifts that divide.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, The Giant's House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imag-ination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize, long-listed for the National Book Award). She has received grants and fellow-ships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and she was chosen as one of Granta's 20 Best American Writers Under 40. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fic-tion at the University of Texas at Austin.

McCracken is a firecracker stylist and every sentence, every image, is crafted for physical impact... It is exuberant, a bit bonkers and raw and unflinching. It will find a great many fans - and no doubt some awards, too. -- Lucy Atkins * Sunday Times * A big, glorious novel in every sense, this sprawling family saga... is a funny and big-hearted epic from a seriously gifted wordsmith. -- Samantha Irby * Marie Claire * McCracken's rambunctious saga [Bowlaway]... is a funhouse of a novel. Even the most incidental of characters are granted glorious vignettes... in [an] unpredictable and startling world. -- Wendy Erskine * Spectator * [McCracken has] considerable gifts as a novelist instinctive access to the most intricate threads of human thought and feeling... This novel's cast grows epic, but McCracken is always most impressive when she works small, when she is describing movie kisses or corsets or simply loneliness and longing. * New York Times * Death and life, frosted with macabre comedy: it's why we've enjoyed Elizabeth McCracken since her debut novel, The Giant's House... nothing is ordinary in this story... There's a wickedness to McCracken's technique, the way she lures us in with her witty voice and oddball characters but then kicks the wind out of us... endlessly surprising. -- Ron Charles * Washington Post * Bowlaway is that most improbable of literary phenomena: a buoyant, joyful, rollicking yarn of sadness and loss... McCracken's gloriously vibrant and boisterously surprising narrative voice is one of the great triumphs of Bowlaway... A tour de force. * Boston Globe * Wildly entertaining... [A] wonderfully unpredictable multi-generational saga which revolves around a Massachusetts bowling alley... Bowlaway celebrates the oddest of oddballs and the freakiest of freak accidents with wit and heart. To read McCracken's inimitably clever sentences and follow her quirky narrative twists is to be constantly delighted. * NPR * Irresistibly quirky... Packed with Dickensian characters and plot devices (orphans, secret wills, hidden treasure...), [Bowlaway is] lyrical and humorous, with some dazzlingly inventive twists. A family saga unlike any other. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday * McCracken's imaginative reserves and her delight in outlandish events make [Bowlaway]... a kind of fable - a colourful and often captivating fantasia on New England themes. * New Yorker * McCracken's newest novel, a 20th-century family epic centered on candlepin bowling, is populated by strange, excellent characters, and unfolds with all the offbeat coziness and heartache of a great American fable: molasses floods, workplace fires, surprising heirs, and all. * Vanity Fair *