By turns terrifying and humorous, clear-eyed and deep-hearted, TWISTER (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) brings us into the center of a storm as a small Midwestern town mourns the death of a young soldier. The novel opens with Rose, the soldier’s fiercely independent mother, whose flame-red hair turns white overnight from grief. Chapter by chapter, her community is revealed and transformed, creating a web of secrets, betrayals, and hopes that ratchet up tension as the tornado approaches. As the storm drives into the heart of town, pasts are revealed and lives are shaken to the core. An unforgettable debut from a keen observer of people, nature, and the ineffable.
You will have to read this novel for yourself to see how a brilliant writer has found the perfect form for evoking the effects of time and place and the forces of history and nature on the lives of human beings. As the title suggests, the movement of TWISTER is as inexorable as it is unpredictable. Genanne Walsh is a writer of extraordinary powers. The work of this novel is both raw and lush with poetry. Her characters live and breathe, and in their intersections, real truths are revealed. -Laura Kasischke, author of Mind of Winter and Eden Springs
Genanne Walsh’s TWISTER is a chronicle of a small town amid the calm before the storm-but so much more. This book digs beneath the surface of place to create a kind of Spoon River Anthology for our time replete with secrets, truths, startling reckonings-and very, very threatening weather. As fine a new novel as you will read this year. -Peter Orner, author of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Genanne Walsh’s TWISTER is a gripping page-turner, but also has that much rarer quality of transcendent, almost preternatural empathy that very few works of fiction possess. TWISTER has it. Novels often get us to walk in someone else’s shoes, but only rarely to climb into someone else’s skin. Walsh miraculously climbs into the skin of not just one, but a dozen characters. When I finished TWISTER, I felt the way the Old Man in the novel felt about being struck by lightning: ‘It furrowed me into something new.’ -Robert Thomas, author of Bridge
