Mr. Splitfoot

A Novel Idea on Passyunk Verified independent store

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A New York Times Editors' Choice and Indie Next Pick. From the author of The Invention of Everything Else comes a contemporary gothic about Mr. Splitfoot, who tracks two women acro ss multiple decades as they march, each in her own time, toward a mysterious reckoning. "Turn to any page of this one-of-a-kind Gothic fiction about motherhood and hauntings--literal and metaphorical--and you'll come upon moments of startling originality...Hunt is scary good."-- O, The Oprah MagazineRuth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth's niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. 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? In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa. 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, a twisted tale of mermaids, won the National Book Foundation's Five under Thirty-five prize. She lives in upstate New York. Show more