It is the turn of this century. Two couplesâbusinessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow, and Snowâs wife, Ruth Farrâhave gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Caroleâs daughter. Susan lives alone in her parentsâ house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farrâs journal, as well as by the menacing young vagrant whoâs taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge.
By turns dazzling and dark, as dangerous and entrancing as the Welsh landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce.
Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award (1999) and the Katherine Anne Porter Award (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006. Davis is senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis; she lives in Montpelier, Vermont.
Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and AudioFile Earphones Awardâwinning narrator. After graduating from Princeton University, she completed a two-year program at William Esper Studio, where she studied with Maggie Flanigan. Her audiobook narration training came from Robin Miles, who has also directed her in several productions. She has recorded dozens of books for a multitude of publishers.
Jayme Mattler is a professional voiceover artist with years of experience in recording, directing, and producing. Passionate about narrating audiobooks, she has been the recipient of multiple Audie Award nominations.