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.
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“An intriguing mystery with clues, suspense, enigmas galore, and an exhilarating, witty, poignant paean to the unexplainable, the unsolvable, the irreducibly mysterious.”
— Boston Globe
“Zombies are out, ghosts are in. Ms. Hunt…taps into the cultural zeitgeist with a new novel blurring the natural and supernatural.”
— Wall Street Journal“Hypnotic and glowing.”
— New York Times Book Review“The historical and the fantastical entwine like snakes in…this blend of romance and phantoms.”
— Washington Post“An American gothic fever dream.”
— Chicago Tribune“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“Ethereal…The book deftly straddles the slippery line between fantasy and reality…This spellbinder is storytelling at its best.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Motherhood, religious zeal, poverty, predation, and the frailty yet relentlessness of life are among the rich themes that Hunt explores here.”
— Booklist (starred review)“A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Readers…by joining the protagonists’ journey will discover that what they imagine they know about someone is often quite different from the reality.”
— School Library JournalBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
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.
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.
Emily Woo Zeller is an artist, actor, dancer, choreographer, and voice artist who has won Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration in 2018. She began her voice-over career by voicing animation in Asia. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013 for her work in Gulp. Other awards include the 2009 Tristen Award for Best Actress as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and the 2006 Roselyn E. Schneider Prize for Creative Achievement.