Description:
A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.
Ruth 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, and the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural--and vice versa.
Brief description:
Samantha Hunt is an author whose 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, earned her selection as one of the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35." Her novel, Mr. Splitfoot, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Paris Review Staff Pick. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, Tin House, A Public Space, and many other publications.
Review Quotes:
"An escapist adventure, a gothic page-turner that is also so finely crafted that you'll feel enriched as well as transported for having read it."
-- "Esquire"