Overview

As the U.S. enters the Second World War, Effie Mae Board thinks she knows her husband of seven years. But a chance discovery prompts her to untangle the secrets of his early life and the wreckage he has left in his wake. As she struggles with these revelations--and examines the decisions she herself made as a young mother--the reader glimpses her husband, Lyons, recklessly careening from one fresh start to another as he tries to find his place after returning from the Great War. NEXT TRAIN OUT started with the author's desire to learn something about a missing grandfather and turned into a picaresque tale of an enigmatic rogue searching for a different life. Is Lyons a heartless narcissist and a scoundrel, or a lost soul trying to navigate the cultural fractures and shifting mores of the early twentieth century? Whatever you decide about Lyons, there's no doubt who Effie Mae is. Readers have fallen in love with the straight-shooting native of the Eastern Kentucky coal camps who tries her level best to understand Lyons and accept him, despite his transgressions. She and Lyons come from vastly different worlds, but they find uncommon common ground in their resiliency and their fearless embrace of each other.

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9780999254035

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"""How can a man hide a secret like that?"" This singular question haunts Effie Mae Board throughout the pages of Next Train Out, the mystery she has to solve to save both her sanity and her marriage. It is also the question her husband, Lyons, determines to answer by finally, for the first time in life, telling the truth. Spanning the years between the end of WWI and the early days of WWII, Showalter deftly turns over the heavy stones of secrets, wanderlust, regret, abandonment, and the pressures of societal expectation to show us what it takes for two people with very different dreams to commit themselves, one to the other. Effie Mae and Lyons will stay with you long after you've turned the final page. --Teri Carter, Lexington Herald-Leader columnist"

How can a man hide a secret like that? This singular question haunts Effie Mae Board throughout the pages of Next Train Out, the mystery she has to solve to save both her sanity and her marriage. It is also the question her husband, Lyons, determines to answer by finally, for the first time in life, telling the truth. Spanning the years between the end of WWI and the early days of WWII, Showalter deftly turns over the heavy stones of secrets, wanderlust, regret, abandonment, and the pressures of societal expectation to show us what it takes for two people with very different dreams to commit themselves, one to the other. Effie Mae and Lyons will stay with you long after you've turned the final page. --Teri Carter, Lexington Herald-Leader columnist

Author Information

After receiving a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sallie Showalter spent 30 years as a writer and editor in higher education, state government, and industry and technology. She lives in central Kentucky.

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