An urgent, vicious blade of a novel about a shocking betrayal and its aftermath, HOT SPRINGS DRIVE asks just how far you’ll go to have everything you want.
HOT SPRINGS DRIVE
by Lindsay Hunter
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, November 2023
Jackie Stinson’s best friend is dead, and everyone knows who killed her.
Jackie wants to be many things, but a martyr has never been one of them. She is an ex-emotional eater and mother of four, who has finally lost the weight she long yearned to be free of. In her new, sharp-edged body, she goes by Jacqueline. But leaving her old self behind proves harder than she ever imagined. And while she believes she should be happier, misery still chases her, and motherhood threatens to subsume what little is left of her.
Her only salve is her best friend Theresa, whose seemingly perfect life she desperately covets. Since they met in the maternity ward 15 years earlier, the two have survived the trials of motherhood side by side—Theresa with her quiet, cherubic daughter, and Jacqueline with her rambunctious, unruly boys. Their bond is tight, but it is not enough to keep Jacqueline, finally moving through the world in the body she has always wanted, from stealing a bit of Theresa’s perfect life.
HOT SPRINGS DRIVE is a dark, heart-pounding exploration of one woman’s deepest desires, and how the consequences of betrayal can ripple outward beyond the initial strike point. In her third, fiercest, and now hotly anticipated novel, acclaimed literary voice Lindsay Hunter deftly peels back the fragile veneer of two suburban families and the secrets roiling between them.
Lindsay Hunter is the author of two story collections and two novels. Her second collection, Don’t Kiss Me, was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award and a 2017 NPR Great Read. She lives in Chicago.
Fifteen year old Natalie has had a horror of blood and meat since the day her bother, Flynn now 17, raped her at age 9. Yet sheand her family (mother, Viv, former trophy wife, now hapless housewife; father, Ray, former accountant, now handyman; andgrandmother, Eleanor) are trapped on an enormous factory farm in a world where climate change has left plant cropsdevastatingly rare, and the Corporation ensures meat is virtually all there is to eat. With grains grown exclusively for raisingcattle, pigs and chicken for slaughter, and greens a black-market luxury, Natalie is emaciated, bitter and angry. She is desperateto escape, but electric fences and the draconian punishments of the Corporation stand in her way.
A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author ElizabethTenant – and what appear to be the remains of a child. Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intriguedby what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But thingsbecome even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written ahundred years before their time. Without much to go on, Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novelMIRAGE. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. Asone mystery leads to the next, constellation-like patterns between his own life and Elizabeth’s appear, helped along by Renata, aself-proclaimed medium, and Oom Sarel, the local museum curator. But as time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, itbecomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not. And why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s been to thevillage before?
At the spry young age of twenty-five, Sai has led a quiet life, keeping the family teahouse up and running —even if that means ignoring the past-due notices—and taking care of his ailing mother. But he has a not-so-secret gift that he’s parlayed into a side career: he was born with the ability see the red threads of fate between soulmates, which lends itself nicely to matchmaking. Sai has thus far been content not to follow his own thread, the only one he’s ever seen that’s gray and fraying.