Highway Blue by Ailsa McFarlane

 

Anne Marie and Cal got married young; she was just nineteen, he a few years older. A year later, he walked out one morning, leaving Anne Marie to an aimless life of bar work, shared apartments and one night stands.

Two years later, he shows up out of the blue, trying to put things right, but he brings trouble with him, and the couple are soon on the run, taking the Highway Blue in search of love and belonging.

Highway Blue is a short novel (less than 200 pages), but a compelling, memorable one. 

Despite the violence that sets Anne Marie and Cal on the run, the book isn't plot-driven as such - this isn't the sort of road trip that involves fast car chases or the encountering of odd people or unusual places. Instead, as they travel south by car and hitch-hiking back to the town where Anne Marie was born, she journeys back though her life, not nostalgically but in an attempt to understand herself and the position she finds herself in now. 

It's beautifully written, told by Anne Marie in the first person, with a haunting, yearning quality. With her, the reader dips back into her childhood and her realtionship with her mother, experiences her all consuming but brief love for Cal, and shares her hunger for something better than she's known so far.