Topeka, Ma 'shuge

FIRST PLACE FICTION WINNER of the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards It is the spring of 1989 and Erika, a disenfranchised fifteen-year-old American girl, is traveling cross-country to elope with her thirty-two-year-old Iranian lover. The only daughter of two immigrant academics, socially inept but bright and precocious, Erika is lured away from home by Majij Aziz, a troubled and deeply flawed physician whose understanding of love is scarred by a lifetime of abuse and a masochistic adherence to a fundamentalist religion. In the ten months that they travel from Oregon across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and into the Midwest, Erika expects Majij to be a paragon of compassion and worldly wisdom, while he believes she is a blank slate. The conflict that arises from these assumptions, winding a path between politics and myth, humor and cultural miscalculation, ultimately becomes the catalyst for violence and tragedy. Each leg of the journey is marked by an escalating distrust. Erika's expectations descend with each new sexual awakening, eroding her trust, while Majij grows increasingly paranoid. A literary story of discovery, TOPEKA, ma 'shuge resonates long after the last page is turned. Atmospheric and haunting, disturbing and prescient, at times hilarious, it is a riveting coming-of-age tale-a jolting, steamy journey to healing and redemption. "TOPEKA is a gripping novel that obliquely expresses, among other things, this country's schizophrenia after 9/11. The identities of the central characters quickly become fluid or fragmented until they are utterly adrift, clinging for dear life to their fixations-with an individual, a race, or an ideology. Raymond Hutson has written a work of singular psychological acuity."-Naeem Murr, author of Nude, The Perfect Man, and The Genius of the Sea Raymond Hutson has given us a complex story of love, crime, and cultural conflict-the prose is always engaging and often poetic." Geoffrey Becker, author of Hot Springs, Black Elvis, and Bluestown. "Raymond Hutson pairs a troubled Iranian doctor with an adrift teenage girl from Oregon and sends them off on the road together in this promising debut. A wise, engaging, and utterly convincing novel by a fresh and talented writer." -Daniel Jones, New York Times contributing editor, and author of Love Illuminated.