Walking: A Love Story

by 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.

202 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2020

About the author

Toby Olson (born 1937 Chicago) is an American novelist.
Through high school and his four years in the Navy as a surgical technician, he lived in California, Arizona, and Texas.
He graduated from Occidental College and Long Island University.
Toby Olson has published eight novels, the most recent of which – The Blond Box – appeared from Fiction Collective-2 in 2003; and numerous books of poetry, including Human Nature (New Directions). A new novel, The Bitter Half, is forthcoming. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olson’s novel Seaview received the PEN/Faulkner award for The Most Distinguished Work of American Fiction in 1983. Toby Olson lives in Philadelphia and in North Truro, on Cape Cod.