Nude Walker: A Novel

Who You Fall in Love With Is Never an Accident   Nude Walker is a love story seen through the prism of postindustrial America. It’s set in Warrenside Pennsylvania which hasn’t prospered since the steel industry died. There Kat Warren-Bineki the daughter of old-guard industrialists falls for Max Asad the son of nouveau riche Lebanese immigrants. The two should never have met but their paths crossed as they returned from Afghanistan where each served with the National Guard. Now Kat is forfeiting her social standing by declaring love for a bitterly resented foreigner and when his heart strays Max jeopardizes his father’s dreams. As the families feud (sometimes comically sometimes ferociously) Warrenside braces for an epic flood and the city’s citizens try to keep busy—with love lust insurance fraud hallucinations . . . any means of outrunning the past.   Bathsheba Monk writes with the spirit of Barbara Kingsolver and the flinty wit of Richard Russo but she’s unlike other writers we know. In a voice as true as it is disarming she depicts the kaleidoscopic tensions between generations and cultures. As Library Journal once noted “Monk makes us see that we are all exiles in a changing world.” In Nude Walker she offers an unlikely romance about the fantastical myths we weave to define ourselves in unmoored times.