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Walk Me to the Distance

A modern Western from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of James

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About this listen

‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy’ – The New York Times

David Larson can never go home.

His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won't even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he breaks down in the nowhere town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming.

There he finds lodging with Chloë Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their ersatz family is complete when Larson takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at the highway rest stop where he works, but at the edge of this tableau lingers the unmistakable spectre of violence.

Blending the grotesquerie of the Southern Gothic with the Western's codes of frontier justice, in Walk Me to the Distance Percival Everett renders a vivid and haunting landscape of the American badlands, where cruelty is the lingua franca.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

Listen to Percival's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel James on Audible now.

 Cooking Food & Wine Genre Fiction Gothic Horror

Critic reviews

Everett's story has violence and pathos, but it is really his terse writing that makes the novel potent. The silences between his taciturn Western characters, like the time bending in good jazz, are loaded with meaning. His characters, alternately pitiful and admirable, are both convincing and memorable . . . This novel is like a winter in Slut's Hole: unsettling, harsh, and ultimately unforgettable
Everett manages to tell a great deal about one man's moral dilemma and cluttered path to repatriation. The note of hope on which this moving story ends, though tentative, is fully deserved
American literature’s philosopher king – and its sharpest satirist
Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy
It's about time this extraordinary writer got some credit this side of the Pond
All stars
Most relevant
This is an interesting story which leaves you pondering the meaning of life .
I enjoyed listening to it as the author has a unique perspective .

Unusual story

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As soon as I began listening to this audiobook I knew I was held in the power of Everett’s engaging language.

His narrative skills are unmatched. Highly skilled at developing each character, description painting in a colourful palette of words that help you create the landscape of the world the characters inhabit.

Percival has an incredible skill of injecting comedy in small chuckle worth places amidst the backdrop of the seriousness of his story.

Interestingly, despite the intensity of this books journey I would conclude my review and call this story… heartwarming and heartbreaking.

Gotta love Percival

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