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Book Nook: The Evening Road, by Laird Hunt

For most of us life is one long series of compromises. We have to make compromises because we want to exist in a society that is often at odds with our own feelings, opinions, and beliefs.
 

In Laird Hunt's latest novel "The Evening Road" his character Ottie Lee has reluctantly allowed herself to make compromises just to get by. Her marriage has become a compromise. Her relationship with her boss involves compromises. And as this story builds her participation in a hideous spectacle, a lynching, becomes just another thing that finds her being swept along by events.

Hunt got the idea for this novel after he heard about a notorious lynching that took place a century ago in Indiana. The author had spent his youth on a farm in the region and he wondered why nobody ever talked about what had happened. It is estimated that over 10,000 people in a festive mood attended the lynching. How times have changed.

I won't say any more about it. Listen to the interview. Laird Hunt is one of our great literary stylists.

The Book Nook on WYSO is made possible by five local library systems in southwest Ohio:  the Greene County Public LibraryWashington-Centerville Public LibraryClark County Public Library, Dayton Metro Library, and Wright Memorial Public Library.

Vick Mickunas introduced the Book Nook author interview program for WYSO in 1994. Over the years he has produced more than 1500 interviews with writers, musicians, poets, politicians, and celebrities. Listen to the Book Nook with Vick Mickunas for intimate conversations about books with the writers who create them. Vick Mickunas reviews books for the Dayton Daily News and the Springfield News Sun.