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The mesmerizing debut novel about driving trucks, loving music, and growing up.
Thomas Dunne Books
January 2007
On Sale: January 9, 2007
Featuring: Jo Pickering; Bobby Pickering; Cosima Stewart
304 pages
ISBN: 0312359446
EAN: 9780312359447
Hardcover
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Fiction
A truck driver's daughter who grows up in the front seat of
her father's truck, Jo shares her father's love of country
music, junk food, and the open highway. Jo's life is a
perfect slice of Americana, except that their "open road" is
in England, and her father--the gentle, melancholy Bobby
Pickering--is from Northern Ireland. The only truly American
thing about Jo is her mother, whom she has never met.
Jo is twelve when she and Bobby pick up hitchhiker Cosima
Stewart, an American country singer whose band is touring
England. They become dedicated fans, and Cosima, touched by
the unlikely duo, comes to regard Jo with an indulgent, even
sisterly, eye.
But when Jo is sixteen, Bobby sinks into serious despair and
Jo seeks refuge in Cosima and the band. When Bobby
disappears, Jo's adoration becomes obsessive as she follows
her idol all to the way to California. Here, in the
sweltering Mohave Desert and alone for the first time, Jo
must face the painful truths of her own life, the mother she
has never known, and the father she can't force from her
mind. With shades of Zadie Smith and Mark Haddon, Albyn Leah
Hall's powerful debut is a page-turning study of what
frightens us about one another and ourselves; of how we run
away and what we can't, ultimately, escape from.
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