Skip content
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale
Highway Blue by Ailsa McFarlane
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
IBD balloon logo

Shop the sale

In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!

Shop now

Highway Blue

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Maria T Creasey

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 4 hours 14 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Brought to you by Penguin.

Featured in the Observer 10 BEST DEBUTS OF 2021.

A hypnotic story of young love on the run.

Anne Marie is adrift San Padua, living a precarious life of shift-work and shared apartments. Her husband Cal left her on their first anniversary and two years later, she can't move on.

When he shows up suddenly on her doorstep, clearly in some kind of trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in an alley near the shore and the young couple flee together, crammed into a beat up car with their broken past. Their ill-at-ease odyssey takes them across a shimmering American landscape and through the darker seams of the country, towards a city that may or may not represent salvation.

Highway Blue is a story of being lost and found; of love, in all its forms; and of how the pursuit of love is, in its turn, a kind of redemption.

In front of me the long length of the road wound out, wound out and wound on under hot sky. And I drove...

'I loved Highway Blue - a dark, glimmering, journey deep into modern America on a knife edge between love and dependence.'
Rosie Price, author of What Red Was

'Hypnotic, stylish, cinematic: Highway Blue holds you captive like a blues song or incantation.' Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

© Ailsa McFarlane 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Ailsa McFarlane was born in 1997 in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in Snowdonia in the United Kingdom. After leaving school, she studied veterinary science before dropping out to travel the United States and Europe by road. Highway Blue is her first novel.

IBD balloon logo

Shop the sale

In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!

Shop now

Reviews

Poignant, moving, and cinematic, this is a story imbued with love and loss that feels at once distantly dreamlike and vividly recognisable. Highway Blue is a beautiful, inspired rendering of the on-the-road journey. At its core is an unforgettable protagonist in Anne Marie. McFarlane has written an irresistible story of love and life's meanderings. A very gifted writer, I was entranced. Ailsa McFarlane's prose combines the razor sharp truth telling of Ottessa Moshfegh with the troubled heart of Raymond Carver, using plain language to conjure a shockingly intense way of seeing. I've never read anything quite like it. I loved Highway Blue - a dark, glimmering, journey deep into modern America on a knife edge between love and dependence. Hypnotic, stylish, cinematic: Highway Blue holds you captive like a blues song or incantation. Expand reviews
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale