Highways and Dancehalls

By - Atkinson, Diana

Floor - Floor 3

Published - St. Martin's Press, New York, 1997

ISBN 10 - 0394280628

ISBN 13 - 9780394280622

Book Status - 1 Qnty Available with us.

Subject - Stripteasers

Shelf No - 4

Call Number - 813.54 ATK

Physical Description - 235 pages : map ; 22 cm

Book Information

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.

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