Thirty years after her stepbrother’s unsolved murder, a reluctant Mary Byrd Thornton is forced by a detective’s call to return to her family and again confront the crime’s irremovable stain.

This stunning debut--from the cofounder of the legendary Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi--is a work of fiction, but the murder is based on the still-unsolved case of Lisa Howorth’s stepbrother, a front page story in the Washington Post. And yet this is not a crime novel; it is an honest and luminous story of a particular time and place in the South, where even calamitous weather can be a character, everyone has a story, and all are inextricably entwined. With a flamboyant cast, splendid dark humor, a potent sense of history, and a shocking true story at its heart, Flying Shoes is a rich and candid novel from a fresh new voice about family and memory and one woman’s flight from a wounded past.