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The Big Door Prize

The Big Door Prize

Current price: $29.00
Publication Date: September 8th, 2020
Publisher:
Random House Large Print
ISBN:
9780593286067
Pages:
512

M.O. Walsh weaves quintessential Southern charm into a quirky scenario to produce The Big Door Prize, a novel that left me curious about the parts of myself I have yet to discover. You’ll recognize the characters as your own next-door neighbors while being challenged to imagine the possibilities lying just past the periphery of a comfortably crafted trajectory. The novel questions what measures a life well-lived and answers with an entertaining tale of a grand machine in a modest town. Maybe potential is immeasurable. Perhaps that is exactly what gives us all hope.

Mary Garner Rees, Lemuria Bookstore, Jackson, MS
September 2020 Indie Next List

Description

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The New York Times bestselling author of My Sunshine Away returns with a gripping and heartfelt novel about a mysterious machine that upends a small Louisiana town, asking us all to wonder if who we truly are is who we truly could be.

What would you do if you knew your life's potential? That's the question facing the residents of Deerfield, Louisiana, when the DNAMIX machine appears in their local grocery store. It's nothing to look at, really—it resembles a plain photo booth. But its promise is amazing: With just a quick swab of your cheek and two dollars, the device claims to use the science of DNA to tell you your life's potential. With enough credibility to make the townspeople curious, soon the former teachers, nurses, and shopkeepers of Deerfield are abruptly changing course to pursue their destinies as magicians, cowboys, and athletes—including the novel's main characters, Douglas Hubbard and his wife, Cherilyn, who both believed they were perfectly happy until they realized they could dream for more....

Written with linguistic grace and a sense of wonder, The Big Door Prize sparkles with keen observations about what it might mean to stay true to oneself while honoring the bonds of marriage, friendship, and community, and how the glimmer of possibility can pull these bonds apart, bring them back together, and make second chances possible, even under the strangest of circumstances.

About the Author

M.O. Walsh's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oxford American, The Southern Review, and Best New American Voices, among others. His novel My Sunshine Away was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and currently directs the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans.