Mr Splitfoot

Description

Nat and Ruth are young orphans, living in a crowded foster home run by an eccentric religious fanatic. When a travelling con-man comes knocking, they see their chance to escape and join him on the road, proclaiming they can channel the dead - for a price, of course Decades later, in a different time and place, Cora is too clever for her office job, too scared of her abysmal lover to cope with her unplanned pregnancy, and she too is looking for a way out. So when her mute Aunt Ruth pays her an unexpected visit, apparently on a mysterious mission, she decides to join her. Together the two women set out on foot, on a strange and unforgettable odyssey across the state of New York. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who - or what - has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road? Ingenious, infectious, subversive and strange, MR SPLITFOOT will take you on a journey you will not regret - and will never forget.

SAMANTHA HUNT's novel about Nikola Tesla, The Invention of Everything Else, was a finalist for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. Her first novel, The Seas, won the National Book Foundation's Five Under Thirty-Five prize. Hunt's work has been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, the New York Times, Tin House, A Public Space, Cabinet, Blind Spot, the London Times and in a number of other fine publications. Her books have been translated into ten languages. She has performed with Jim Jarmusch and Luc Sante at All Tomorrow's Parties, at Los Angeles's Hammer Museum and REDCAT, with the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA) at PS122, in the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series, at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival, and as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival. Her work has been performed on This American Life and on WNYC's Selected Shorts program. She lives in Tivoli, New York, and teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Mr. Splitfoot is lyrical, echoing, deeply strange, with a quality of sustained hallucination. It is the best book on communicating with the dead since William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley, but it swaps out that novel's cynicism for a more life-affirming sense of uncertainty - Luc Sante, author of Low Life Samantha Hunt is an exciting find - a fresh original voice...a fantastical love story ... literary gold - Sunday Express Hunt's writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction - the New Yorker Hunt [is] a writer to watch - Time Out New York I'm speechless. Samantha Hunt's Mr Splitfoot is so good, so inventive, so new, that I don't think I've read anything like it in years. On the surface it's about false spirituality and the most demented road trip across New York State ever attempted, but it's also about the horrible ties that bind us to one another and the small acts of redemption that make life almost okay. - Gary Shteyngart Part road trip, part gothic, Mr Splitfoot belongs on the shelf beside The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Samantha Hunt is astonishing. Her every sentence electrifies. Her characters demand our closest attention. Her new book contains everything that I want in a novel. If I could long-distance mesmerize you, dear reader, into picking up this book and buying it and reading it at once, believe me: I would. - Kelly Link A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion. - Kirkus Starred review 'This spellbinder is storytelling at its best' - Publishers Weekly, starred