Hot Springs Drive
Lindsay’s fifth book, a novel titled Hot Springs Drive, is forthcoming on Roxane Gay Books on November 7, 2023. It has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal, as well as a rave from Booklist. It is an Audacious Book Club Selection and was named one of the 12 Best Thrillers of 2023 by the Washington Post.
She recently talked to CrimeReads about the book. Hear her talk more about it here.
Cover by the legendary CHIP KIDD!
Eat Only When You’re Hungry
Achingly funny and full of feeling, Eat Only When You’re Hungry follows fifty-eight-year-old Greg as he searches for his son, GJ, an addict who has been missing for three weeks. Greg is bored, demoralized, obese, and as dubious of GJ’s desire to be found as he is of his own motivation to go looking. Almost on a whim, Greg embarks on a road trip to central Florida—a noble search for his son, or so he tells himself.
Greg takes us on a tour of highway and roadside, of Taco Bell, KFC, gas-station Slurpees, sticky strip-club floors, pooling sweat, candy wrappers and crumpled panes of cellophane and wrinkled plastic bags tumbling along the interstate. This is the America Greg knows, one he feels closer to than to his youthful idealism, closer even than to his younger second wife. As his journey continues, through drive-thru windows and into the living rooms of his alluring ex-wife and his distant, curmudgeonly father, Greg’s urgent search for GJ slowly recedes into the background, replaced with a painstaking, illuminating, and unavoidable look at Greg’s own mistakes—as a father, as a husband, and as a man.
Brimming with the same visceral regret and joy that leak from the fast food Greg inhales, Eat Only When You’re Hungry is a wild and biting study of addiction, perseverance, and the insurmountable struggle to change. With America’s desolate underbelly serving as her guide, Lindsay Hunter elicits a singular type of sympathy for her characters, using them to challenge our preconceived notions about addiction and to explore the innumerable ways we fail ourselves.
Praise for Eat Only When You’re Hungry
*One of Nylon and Chicago Reader’s “Books We Can’t Wait To Read In 2017,” and one of Buzzfeed and Vulture’s Best Books to Read This Summer*
The Cruel Radiance of What Is: On Lindsay Hunter’s Eat Only When You’re Hungry, LA Review of Books
“The frailties of the human body and the human heart are laid bare in Lindsay Hunter’s utterly superb novel Eat Only When You’re Hungry. There is real delicacy, tenderness, and intelligence with which Hunter tackles this portrait of a broken family of people who don’t realize just how broken they are until they are forced to confront the fractures between them and within themselves. With this novel, Hunter establishes herself as an unforgettable voice in American letters. Her work here, as ever, is unparalleled.” —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
“This novel takes us on a road trip with an American Everyman into the heart of American hunger—for freedom, for connection, for junk food, for love. Hunter has a brilliant sense for the perfectly telling image, and her humor is so biting and smart it was almost a surprise, at the end of this engrossing book, to realize how thoroughly she had broken my heart.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Compassionate, claustrophobic, gut-wrenchingly observed, Eat Only When You’re Hungry probes the fine lines between hunger and addiction, addiction and desire. In perfectly nuanced prose, Lindsay Hunter observes the human ability to go on in the face of the unexpected, the unknown, the regretted, and, perhaps most important, the mundane.” —Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade
Ugly Girls
“Lindsay Hunter is a dazzling talent, and with Ugly Girls she has written what will surely go down as a new American classic. Every character is complex, every scene is dense as a bullet, and every sentence pulses with electricity. Magnificent.” —Christina Henriquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans
“Ugly Girls is a thrilling joyride of a novel, a dark and vital book that feels threatening in its rawness, its power, its unflinching portrait of youth. Lindsay Hunter lays bare the complexities of two girls’ friendship—their taunting and cruelty, their rivalry and insecurity and abiding protectiveness—and she does it with urgency, wry humor, and surprising, menacing beauty.” —Bret Anthony Johnson, author of Corpus Christi and Remember Me Like This
“Lindsay Hunter is the mistress of grit, all the dirty little details that make a story feel real and sad and true.” —Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins
“I am in awe of Lindsay Hunter. Her debut novel is a canny examination of American girlhood under pressure—gritty, terrifying, and funny as hell. As Perry and Baby Girl, bound together by a friendship that is at once tender and toxic, hurtle through their world of trailer parks and stolen cars and lies, the dangerous secrets they uncover are matched only by the darkness simmering within. Ugly Girls is spiky, electric, unforgettable.” —Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth and Find Me
“The first great twenty-first-century novel about the dirty realities of class has finally arrived. Baby Girl and Perry are a pair of ugly outlaws conceived by one of America’s great outlaw voices. They steal everything they can, but this is the type of book that’s going to steal your time. You better get ready, people. To use Baby Girl’s favorite word, this is one bad-ass ‘bitch’ of a book.” —Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia and Hill William
Perry and Baby Girl are best friends, though you wouldn’t know it if you met them. Their friendship is woven from the threads of never-ending dares and power struggles, their loyalty fierce but incredibly fraught. They spend their nights sneaking out of their trailers, stealing cars for joyrides, and doing all they can to appear hard to the outside world.With all their energy focused on deceiving themselves and the people around them, they don’t know that real danger lurks: Jamey, an alleged high school student from a nearby town, has been pining after Perry from behind the computer screen in his mother’s trailer for some time now, following Perry and Baby Girl’s every move—on Facebook, via instant messaging and text,and, unbeknownst to the girls, in person. When Perry and Baby Girl finally agree to meet Jamey face-to-face, they quickly realize he’s far from the shy high school boy they thought he was, and they’ll do whatever is necessary to protect themselves.
Lindsay Hunter’s stories have been called “mesmerizing… visceral … exquisite” (Chicago Tribune), and in Ugly Girls she calls on all her faculties as a wholly original storyteller to deliver the most searing, poignant, powerful debut novel in years.
DON’T KISS ME
With broken language, deep vernacular, unexpectedly fierce empathy, and a pace that’ll break your granny’s neck, Lindsay Hunter lures, cajoles, and wrenches readers into the wild world of Don’t Kiss Me.
Here you’ll meet Peggy Paula, who works the late shift at Perkin’s and envies the popular girls who come in to eat french fries and brag about how far they let the boys get with them. You’ll meet a woman in her mid-thirties pining for her mean-spirited, abusive boyfriend, Del, a nine-year-old who is in no way her actual boyfriend. And just try to resist the noir story of a reluctant, Afrin-addled detective.
Self-loathing, self-loving, and otherwise trapped by their own dumb selves, these characters make one cringe-worthy mistake after another. But for each bone-headed move, Hunter delivers a surprising moment that chokes you up as you peer into what seemed like deep emptiness and discover a profound longing for human understanding. It’s the collision of these moments that make this a powerful, alive book.
The stories of Don’t Kiss Me are united by Hunter’s singular voice and unflinching eye. By turns crass and tender, heartbreaking and devastatingly funny, her stories expose a world full of characters seemingly driven by desperation, but in the end, they’re the ones who get the last laugh. Hunter is at the forefront of the boldest, most provocative writers working now.
Daddy’s
You ever fed yourself something bad? Like a candied rattlesnake, or a couple fingers of antifreeze? Nope? You seen what it done to other people? Like while they’re flopping around on the floor and you’re thinking about how they’re fighting to live? Like while they’re dying they never looked so alive? That’s what Daddy’s is like. In this collection of toxic southern gothics, packaged as a bait box of temptation, Lindsay Hunter offers an exploration not of the human heart but of the spine: mixing sex, violence, and love into a harrowing, head-spinning read that’ll push you a little further toward flopping.