The Way the Family Got Away

By Michael Kimball

A remarkable first novel about a journey across America and the effects of grief and loss on a family that is trying to stay together when everything is falling apart.

This is the way the family got away. They pack all the things they can fit into the car and place the body of their dead brother in the toy box and put him in the boot. They leave Mineola, Texas and head across the terrifying, vacant landscape of Mid-America. In every place they visit, they sell off what they can to make it to the next town. They keep going to keep the family together.

Michael Kimball’s remarkable The Way The Family Got Away is the story of the journey seen through the eyes of the family’s surviving children, a young boy and his younger sister. They try to make sense of death; why they must leave home and how they get from one place to the next. It is an extraordinary study of the effects of grief upon language and the ways that loss makes itself felt through a child’s imagination.

Format: Hardback
Release Date: 06 Jul 2000
Pages: 160
ISBN: 978-1-84115-208-0
In 1998 Michael Kimball received a grant from the prestigious New York Foundation of the Arts. He has published fiction in New Orleans Review, Story Quarterly and The Quarterly – he is also a frequent reader at the reknowned KGB Bar Reading Series. He lives in Texas with his wife.

“Michael Kimball never ceases to astonish. His sentences build worlds, and are worlds. How Much of Us There Was doesn't represent life, it is life, and with this novel Michael Kimball proves once again he is a hero of contemporary fiction.' Sam Lipsyte -