It is the turn of this century. Two couples—businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow, and Snow’s wife, Ruth Farr—have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole’s daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents’ house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr’s journal, as well as by the menacing young vagrant who’s taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge.
By turns dazzling and dark, as dangerous and entrancing as the Welsh landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce.
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“The playfulness of Davis’s writing is irresistible…Her prose is clever, sometimes dazzling, skating lightly over complex ideas that otherwise might bog down the narrative.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award (1999) and the Katherine Anne Porter Award (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006. Davis is senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis; she lives in Montpelier, Vermont.
Jeff Cummings, as an audiobook narrator, has won both an Earphones Award and the prestigious Audie Award in 2015 for Best Narration in Science and Technology. He is also a twenty-year veteran of the stage, having worked at many regional theaters across the country, from A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle and the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta to the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City and the International Mystery Writers’ Festival in Owensboro, Kentucky. He also spent seven seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.