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.
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June, 1878. The body of a boy is pulled from the depths of the River Thames, suspected to be the beloved missing child of the widely admired Liberal MP Ralph Gethin.
How he wished to paint it. The razed city. The human drama. He saw the old forms broken, shaped in new alignments, the destructible world abstracted in splendid innovations…Already he understood the power of derangement, and how a single window might contain an entire fate.
Twenty-two years ago, Naomi Shaw believed in magic. She and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent that summer roaming the woods of Chester, Washington, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder—the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly, with Cass and Liv stumbling onto the road covered in blood. Naomi had been attacked, was nearly dead. But miraculously, Naomi survived her seventeen stab wounds, and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes. And they were liars. The day she learns that Alan Michael Stahl has died in prison, Naomi gets a call from Olivia. For twenty-two years, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for: a skeleton in the woods that was the center of their rituals and imagined magic that summer. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi is forced back to the town she’d escaped. When Olivia disappears, Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be. Naomi thought the Goddess Game was over. But it’s just beginning.
As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob’s tumultuous relationship with Isaac’s mother and the shame he carries from the dissolution of their family. Tragedies that informed Jacob’s role as a father and his reaction to Isaac’s being gay. But most of all, Jacob must share with Isaac the unspoken truths that reside in his heart. He must give voice to the trauma that Isaac has inherited. And he must create a space for the two to find peace.