Highways and Dancehalls
This is a startling novel — as much for the power and beauty of the writing as for its vivid, searing tale of life on the road as a stripper in Canada.
Sarah is the product of a university family that blew angrily apart and the survivor of a childhood disease that meant lonely years spent in the grip of an insensitive medical establishment. Now, scarred in more ways than one, she is a seventeen-year-old high school dropout trying to make a living in the recession. Prospects are dim, and soon she is "Tabitha," heading out on the circuit of motels and strip-bars through the mining towns and suburbs of a seemingly bucolic West Coast.
On-stage, dressed in elaborate costumes, she offers a vision of a sex and beauty. Off-stage, she tries to befriend the bikers and strippers and populate her life on the road, but friendships are fleeting when home is a Greyhound bus or a room behind a neon sign on the highway.
Diana Atkinson paints a poignant, darkly humorous portrait of the reality behind voyeurism and desire. Delving into the shadowy moments of sex and survival, her work flashes with loss and beauty and a true empathy for those who live on the margins.
- Author
- Diana Atkinson
- Format
- paperback
- Pages
- 240
- Publisher
- Vintage Canada
- Language
- english
- ISBN
- 9780394281629
- Genres
- fiction, canada
- Release date
- 1996
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