Synopsis
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.
Author Bio
Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize winner and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, One Story, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other journals, and have been distinguished by Best American Short Stories. Her book reviews and criticism have appeared in Liberties and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Devon holds a Fiction MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She was raised in Athens, Ohio, and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Praise for To Stay, To Stay, To Stay
“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
“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
“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
Press, Media, & Interviews
Contact
Publicity: Katie Kurtzman at KTK Publicity
Literary Agent: Amy Williams at The Williams Company
Film/TV Agent: Elizabeth Newman at Literate Inc
Author Photos
Photo Credit: Scott Koenig