Walking — Toby Olson

By turns romantic and disquieting, Toby Olson's Walking weaves the real and the imagined into a chilling, occasionally hopeful tapestry. Set on an imaginary peninsula on the New England coast, Walking presents a lyrical, nightmarish, and unexpected world, replete with ski mountains, flocks of sheep, and a weeklong Day of the Dead festival. In the midst of this strange place lives Aphrodite, a woman raised by a disturbing father whose gaze seemed to follow her everywhere. Now an adult, Aphrodite is always walking, still trying to escape his stare.

An unstable narrator, Aphrodite plunges readers into a story where the characters she imagines blend seamlessly with a real world beyond her control. As the peninsula's idiosyncratic citizens converge for the Day of the Dead celebrations, the connections between their lives and Aphrodite's father slowly become clear. And when her father appears, he sets in motion a terrifying chain of events that force each character to face demons from their past and to decide what kind of future they want to live in.