As a child growing up in Depression-era rural Virginia, Eddie Alley’s quiet life is rooted in the rumors of his mother’s witchcraft. But when he's visited by a writer and glamorous photographer researching American folklore for the WPA, the spell of his mother’s unorthodox life is violently disrupted, and Eddie is inspired to pursue a future beyond the confines of his dead-end town. He leaves for New York and becomes a television horror-movie presenter beloved for his kitschy comedy. Though expert at softening terror for his young fans, Eddie cannot escape the guilty secrets of his own childhood. When he opens his family’s door to a homeless teenager working as an intern at the TV station, the boy’s presence not only awakens something in Eddie, but also in his twelve-year-old daughter, Wallis, who has begun to feel a strange kinship to her notorious grandmother. As the ghost stories of one generation infiltrate the next, Wallis and Eddie grapple with the sins of the past to repair their misguided attempts at loyalty and redemption. In Witches on the Road Tonight , bestselling author Sheri Holman teases out the dark compulsions and desperate longings that blur the line between love and betrayal. — Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel —A Boston Globe Book of the Year —A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year —A New York Times Editors' Choice — Winner of an Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for Literary Fiction “Sheri Holman has an imagination that is both capacious and meticulous, and by turns somber and antic. . . . One of the pleasures of Witches on the Road Tonight is Holman’s copious knowledge of American popular cultures as they shade into American folk culture. . . . [Holman] is not exploiting the current rage for vampires, witches, and werewolves—[her] magic is homegrown and rooted in the soil. Holman’s characters have bona fide issues of identity and legitimate sources of pain that magic exacerbates rather than erases. The originality here lies in the author’s ability to reshuffle the materials of pop literature and contemplate them anew. . . . Holman [has] a restless adventurousness that is the mark of a born novelist, the sort of novelist who can’t help writing even if the novel is dying or literary culture is evolving or apps are replacing human brains. Witches on the Road Tonight is a path into her work that beckons, with strange lights and mysterious apparitions.”— Los Angeles Review of Books “Sheri Holman is a difficult writer to categorize. She can write an elegantly observant novel of domestic absurdity, and she can write a book humming with Romantic misery and ghastly horror. . . . . Holman is an original, and her literary ideas are so sublimely odd that they seem to have exited her imagination of their own free will. . . . Marvelously creepy, touching, and tender . . . Witches on the Road Tonight is about the power of narrative and its hold on us. . . . The dialect we speak now, Holman says with eloquence, humor, and urgency, is that of televised natural disaster, war, starvation. Instead of horror, we have terror.”— The New York Review of Books “Undeniably impressive . . . [Holman] boasts a fine Gothic imagination, summoning visceral details at will . . . [and] evoking the blur between the real and the supernatural as if it were the most straightforward thing, a knack possessed by few writers, though Alice Hoffman immediately springs to mind. . . . [ Witches on the Road Tonight ] explores the dark vein of magic that runs just beneath our real lives.”— The New York Times Book Review "Holman is a master of the miniature. She uses tiny, achingly accurate details to bring each moment to life on the page; her sentences sing. . . . This richly layered novel is Holman's most ambitious and successful yet."— People (4 stars) “[Witches on the Road Tonight takes readers] deep into the secretive silence and sublime vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a setting which Holman splendidly evokes in all its eerie beauty. . . . . She is as eloquent about the physical landscape of her stories as she is about the internal terrain of human emotion. . . . Seductive and hallucinatory . . . Witches on the Road Tonight is less about monsters and witches than it is about people whose fears and failings are profoundly and recognizably human.”— The Washington Post "Holman possesses a set of literary gifts that rarely come in pairs. She's a goddess of the details that bring a place, a person, a moment to life on the page. And she's a skilled practitioner of magic realism, weaving the imaginary and the actual together into one seamless, transporting whole."—Meredith Maran, Boston Globe (Best Books of the Year) “Holman’s clear and thoughtful prose deals with guilt, love, and the possibility of redemption. . . . [A] rich and rewarding read, elegant and assured.”—The Barnes & Noble Review "Mysterious, beautiful, and immediately engrossing, Witches on the Road Toni