(He’d taken too much aspirin.) McCracken ( The Giant’s House) describes Truitt’s as Bertha watches the structure come to life: the six lanes, the warehouse-high ceilings, the cellar holding a secret safe, the second-story apartment which Joe Wear will call home. BOWLAWAY By Elizabeth McCracken Bowlaway begins with a body in a cemetery: a mysterious woman wearing a divided skirt, a small bowling ball and bowling pin in her bag. These women find solace at the alley alongside its manager, Joe Wear, the boy who found Bertha at the graveyard before she tapped him to run the place, and its pinsetter, Jeptha Arrison, a dopey sad-sack Bertha met in the local hospital. Bowlaway Elizabeth McCracken 3.11 6,228 ratings1,252 reviews A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley. Bertha invites women to bowl - “Let ‘em gawk,” she says of leering men - drawing in a horde of lost souls trapped in time, like LuEtta Mood, a beautiful young housewife grieving the death of a child. In Bowlaway, throughout the course of nearly a century and over three generations, the family trees that populate the book get mixed up and branches get tangled in unexpected ways. (Also, utterly New England: Candlepin is “a game of purity for former puritans.”) The majority of Bowlaway takes place at Truitt’s. McCracken’s clever narrator says in the first chapter, “Our subject is love because our subject is bowling” - two motifs that, by the end of this novel, feel inseparable, entwined. Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, and The Hero of This Book.

Bowlaway elizabeth mccracken