Highways and Dancehalls — Diana Atkinson

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.