The Evening Road

Laird Hunt Chatto & Windus €16.99 But for one irritating blemish, The Evening Road could have been a very powerful novel. It is set in Indiana in 1920, in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, and revolves around a public lynching, which is rather gruesomely awaited by the locals as eagerly as a football match. The narrative is shared between a white woman, Otttie Lee, and a black woman, Calla, both sympathetically drawn and blessed with the same streetwise resilience. Unfortunately, Hunt has chosen to refer to all black characters as ‘cornflowers’ and all white characters as ‘cornsilks’. The device is frankly bonkers and needs rectifying in future editions. Max Davidson