Flying Shoes

Description

Thirty years ago, on Mother's Day, Mary Byrd Thornton's nine-year-old stepbrother was murdered. His killer was never found. At the time, Mary Byrd had been fifteen: in love and caught up in the excitement of the Sixties, and when Stevie died, her family and her life fell apart. All these years Mary Byrd has suppressed the tragedy and the knowledge that the murderer is still out there, as well as her own nagging guilt over Stevie's death. She has built a life for herself in Mississippi, with a Southern gentleman for a husband and two children she adores. With her ramshackle house, her teeming garden and her menagerie of animals, she is immersed in a comfortable, if somewhat eccentric and occasionally restless day-to-day existence. But when a journalist chances upon the mystery of Stevie's death and begins to dig into it, Mary Byrd suddenly finds herself on a reluctant journey back to her childhood home in Virginia. Along the way she encounters help from unexpected quarters and finds herself confronting not only her family's story but the stories of many others - both the living and the dead. Rich with humour and pathos, and peopled with a glorious cast of characters, Flying Shoes is a luminous novel about loss and recovery, love and fidelity - about losing your footing and remembering how to soar.

Promotion info

A beguiling, darkly humorous and bittersweet novel based on the real-life 30-year-old unsolved case of the author's stepbrother's murder

Reviews

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 description

Lisa Howorth was born in Washington, DC, where her family has lived for three generations. After doing some wandering, she moved to Oxford, Mississippi, because of her interest in civil rights, blues music and William Faulkner. There she met and married her husband, Richard Howorth. They opened Square Books in 1979 and have three grown-up children, Claire, Beckett and Bebe. http://www.squarebooks.com/ @SquareBooks