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LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
An ensemble cast collides and crosses paths in their small corner of the Midwest where no one is a stranger: the baker, the realtor, the poet, the gardener, the frustrated artist. In Devon Halliday’s transcendent debut novel, secrets turn contagious, impulses transform into resolutions, and no one is certain whether they will remain in the confines of their Appalachian college town or step out into the unknown.
Surrounded by hills, buried in green, Eden is a forgotten town full of ordinary lives. But over the course of a humid summer week, seven of these ordinary lives reach their boiling point, as the existential questions of each begin to urgently entwine. Underneath the threat of marital infidelity, financial ruin, and life-changing illness is always the same question: To stay, or to go? If you choose to stay, is it ever a permanent choice? Can you be sure you’ll choose it again tomorrow? A mosaic portrait of love and its close substitutes, the novel suggests, fearfully, that even our best decisions might be fragile, arbitrary, and impermanent.
Praise for To Stay, To Stay, To Stay
“Some books you just know from the first paragraph. It’s going to hit you hard. To Stay, To Stay, To Stay is one of them. It’s about the great contradiction of love, that it brings both great bafflement and great clarity, and somehow, ultimately, isn’t a contradiction. So much hard-earned daily wisdom here. Late in the novel, Halliday writes, ‘Resolutions are very small bursts of light, doomed to fade.’ I needed this book. You probably do too.”
—Peter Orner, author of The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter
“Here we are in Eden, which is, as always, a tangled bramble of trouble, the good kind as well as the worst. In this enchanting tale of small-town love, artisanal bread, and sketchy real estate, Devon Halliday explores the webs that connect us and the mysterious forces that break those webs apart and toss them aside like yesterday’s stale ciabatta. Everything and everyone in this wonderful novel is rendered with precision, wit, and uncompromising humanity. I rooted for all of them, and you will too!”
—David Haynes, author of Martha’s Daughter
“Devon Halliday has such a mastery of language and storytelling artistry that it’s hard to believe To Stay, To Stay, To Stay is her debut. This novel, a wry and incisive exploration of how people behave (and misbehave) at the critical inflection points in their lives, is a marvel.”
—Marisa Silver, author of At Last
“A preternaturally wise and wickedly ambitious debut. Halliday’s small town and big cast of characters cast a spell under which I would happily have stayed, stayed, stayed. Alas, the ending is perfection, too.”
—Anna Solomon, author of The Book of V
“With rare emotional precision and a fierce, glowing heart, Devon Halliday investigates the stories people tell themselves about love and the combustible, constant anxieties that sustain those stories. To Stay, To Stay, To Stay is funny, unforgettable, and deeply moving, a book about the ways in which we both crave and avoid intimacy, often on the very same day. This marvelous debut novel wisely asks an urgent, contemporary question: What’s braver? Blowing up your life? Or simply living it, however it unfolds?”
—Dean Bakopoulos, author of Summerlong
“What a delightful debut novel by Devon Halliday—its pages full of sun and shadow, love and gravity. To Stay, To Stay, To Stay handles its cast of characters with deftness and grace, showing us the many facets of people in a small town as they connect and disconnect from one another. Reading this book is like looking through a prism, vivid with shimmering rainbow light.”
—Alix Ohlin, author of Dual Citizens