Highway Blue reads like you're finding voices of old friends. It's familiar and yet new at the same time. There were times when Anne Marie (the narrator) reminded me of Esther Greenwood's voice. The amassing of declarative sentences void of emotion during scenes which one might imagine filled with panic and tumult. But as it when on, I felt that Anne Marie was a female Meursault and that Highway Blue seems destined to be The Stranger of the 21st century. Clinical, detached, existential and ultimately unresolved. It's very clever and super stylised and, I would imagine, will win a lot of literary prizes. With many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for letting me see an advance copy of this title.

i Love the story and how she describes the scenes i was really into it . Love that !

Thanks so much to Vintage for letting me read Highway Blue in advance! I'd heard about this one before (not sure where) and I was very happy when I noticed it pop up on NetGalley. This is about Anne Marie, living an unhappy, rootless existence when her estranged husband Cal turns up out of the blue, asking for money. Something goes wrong and they're forced to flee, hitchhiking and travelling along the coast. . This is a perfect example of a book where I truly feel like the author has totally accomplished what they set out to do and I can't think of anything that could be improved - but I just didn't love it, because it's not 100% my thing? If that makes sense. Ailsa McFarlane has such a sparse and clean prose style, almost Hemingway-esque, and the towns and landscapes Anne Marie and Cal pass through are made so vivid and atmospheric through her sharp descriptions. I'm not sure what part of America this book is supposed to be set in, but it conjures up so well a world of baking hot days, grubby small towns, aimless people, and the relentless pull of the ocean. I also really liked the trickling of Anne Marie's past through the narrative, and the way so much is still left to be revealed. I gave it four stars on NetGalley because, whilst there is so much to admire in this book, I never felt that emotional pull that makes me fall in love with a book. But what a talent! I can't wait to see what she does next.

“Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night The first one's named sweet Anne Marie and she's my hearts delight The second one is prison, babe, the sheriff's on my trail And if he catches up with me, I'll spend my life in jail” I first came across this novel on the Guardian’s best debut novelists of 2021 feature – which last year featured Douglas Stuart (who went on to win the Booker) and this year featured a number of excellent debuts I have already read including two books which have been longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize: Caleb Azumah Nelson, Rebecca Watson; the outstanding debut by Natasha Brown; as well as Megan Nolan and Abigail Dean. I was therefore delighted when the publisher made an ARC available through NetGalley. The author describes the book well as “a novel about outsiders, love and loneliness, and the desire for a sense of belonging”, and a novel which takes the American road trip novel genre (one which is partly autobiographical for her, having dropped out of Vet studies in the UK to return to the US of her birth for a road trip) and “plays around within it, to put my own spin on it. I also like a slightly raw, ragged and offbeat feel.” This book – a short novella easily read in a couple of sittings, is narrated by the young Anne Marie. At the book’s opening she is living a rather aimless life in the fictional coastal town of San Padua, where she was abandoned a few years back after a brief marriage to Cal. To her surprise he shows up on her doorstep one day, and over a drink tries and fails to get some money from her to help with some troubles he has got into further North. Walking back, his troubles catch up with him and in a fracas the gun held by Cal’s assailant goes off, and realising they face a murder charge Cal and the reluctant Ann Marie head South, sometimes hitching lifts sometimes in a beat up car. Their journey takes them through a landscape and regions which are simultaneously evocative but also indeterminate. The author has called it an “almost mythological” version of America It seems to me to capture the way in which both Cal and Ann Marie, in their own way, are searching for something (home, roots, a sense of belonging, a fixed identity, meaning) that they have never really had and perhaps will never find. Cal comments, in one of the rare insights into his true feeling and the fears that lie behind his easy going confidence and bluster: “I have this feeling, this smothering feeling, and it’s pressing on me all the time and it’s like I’m burning up against the whole world and the only way to escape it is to move, to keep moving so it doesn’t catch up with me.” Ann Marie by contrast seems to be fleeing from bodily existence, or perhaps more trying to find evidence to reconcile external corporeality “somehow I was very aware of my skin stretching over the bones of my face and I could almost feel it, that tension, and I could feel, too, the separation of me, of my bony gray body alone on a reflected field of white tiles and I felt the space around me with no one else there to break it. I seemed so odd, a small odd construction of white bone and slick red muscle and nameless yellow sludge all tied up with sinews and tendons and packaged mechanically to stand or fall.” with her inner world of feeling and need for connection, a connection she thought she had found in Cal only to realise she had not “A few years later I met Cal and decided to align the course of my happiness with him and that was that …. I thought he would stop me from being alone in my own head. I pinned that expectation on another collection of cells who was just as lost and hopeless and confused at finding themselves in the unexpected state of being conscious as I was. And in there was my mistake, my huge steaming train wreck ….. I used to believe that we, a little fringed- off species, isolated lumbering hunks of flesh, could truly know one another purely and selflessly. Whatever that was supposed to mean” We get glimpses of both their upbringings marked by death of parents – parents who themselves seemed to represent a life that their children rejected but without really knowing how to replace it; and of their brief marriage based it seems more on impulse, and a desire to escape than on any sense of love or shared purpose – and which inevitably finished as easily as it began. A couple of times lyric extracts come to Ann Marie’s mind - which with some Googling I found were from Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” – which I assume (given the verse with which I open my review – lyrics featured in the novel) stands as a coda for the novel (and gives the narrator her name). Overall a promising debut novel - 3.5 rounded up

When Cal, her estranged husband unexpectedly turns up at Anne Marie's shared apartment one evening the event that follows sets them off together on a journey to escape. As they cross America with no real plans Anne Marie starts to look back at her life, her brief marriage to Cal, her life after he suddenly left her as she tried to rebuild it, her memories of her mother and her feeling as an outsider after the sudden death of her mother when she was a teenager. As she processses all of this and also her current feelings towards Cal, you feel that she is searching for something but doesn't know what and even at the end of this short novel you are left wondering if she has found a way forward. I was given a copy of Highway Blue by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.