An NPR Best Book of the Year

Instant New York Times Bestseller

An Entertainment Weekly 'Must List' Pick

“The last page is as satisfying as the first.” —Kathryn Stockett

“I really loved this book... I can't praise it enough.”—Anne Rice

“It's a book to read and reread, one that will only get better with time.”—Tom Franklin
 

It was the summer everything changed.…

My Sunshine Away unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish, and passionate football fandom. But in the summer of 1989, when fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson—free spirit, track star, and belle of the block—experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too.

In My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh brilliantly juxtaposes the enchantment of a charmed childhood with the gripping story of a violent crime, unraveling families, and consuming adolescent love. Acutely wise and deeply honest, it is an astonishing and page-turning debut about the meaning of family, the power of memory, and our ability to forgive. 

The Amazon Debut Spotlight Selection for February 2015: After only 50 pages My Sunshine Away gave me the same feeling as other Southern novels that have long remained favorites; The Help and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, to name two. How much of our future self is shaped by our first love, our early mistakes, and trading sweet innocence for the acrid recognition of cruelty? A lot, we discover, as we ride shotgun with a narrator who was fourteen the year that a crime against the girl he loved changed him irrevocably. This coming-of-age story set in a quiet Louisiana neighborhood touched by violence is by turns suspenseful and insightful, peppered with moments like this one that I want to commit to memory: “We were all middle-to-upper-class white kids, all the products of our parents’ success, and when we played with one another at school we played in the mirror.” –Seira Wilson

Suggested by Members

Recommended to book clubs by 3 of 3 members.