“To read Hiking Underground is to enter the slipstream of three equally compelling psyches and to fall into a trance of empathy. Smiley brilliantly evokes the tension between reverie and reality in this deeply humane, beautifully original novel.”

– Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man and The Last Cruise

Written under the star of motherhood

Nothing happens, and everything happens, in this seemingly quiet novel, where Amy Smiley takes us deep into the emotional bond between three people – a mother, her son, and his babysitter – and follows each of them through a period of growth, from one spring to the next, until they are able to step out into the world more freely, with nature as their guide.

With its subtle focus on the inner life, Amy Smiley’s prose conveys the beneficial power of reverie, teaching us that we need more of it, to help us each find meaning in our lives. Written under the star of motherhood, Hiking Underground is an exquisite meditation on the interplay of nurture, connection and creativity.

“In Hiking Underground, Amy Smiley has written a dreamy meditation on intimacy and inner growth, with a Woolf-like attention to interior voices. A lovely meditation on inter-relationship.”

– Naomi Wolf, author of The Bodies of Others

“Smiley keeps the reader of Hiking Underground rapt in anticipation, waiting not for some plot conflict resolution, but for the different variations on the novel’s theme to converge, which they do, with delightful intricacy. Smiley writes for artists.”
– V. N. Alexander, author of Locus Amoenus

“Amy Smiley’s subtle triangular rotation evokes a New York City dreamscape that suggests a new, Manhattan version of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant – a vision that Aragon would have found delightful for its freshness and invention, its crisscrossing of myth and wit, its reverence for the city and wonder for nature.”
– Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

“This remarkable book will hold you in its grasp from the first word to the last. Illuminated by descriptions of ordinary things in urban daily life that subtly become far more than mundane, the novel is filled with domestic details that echo with deep significance. Its characters live on different planes of consciousness, and Smiley guides the reader into their depths and across their surfaces. Smiley has an uncanny ability to direct readers’ attention to the tiny details of how things come into being – from the emergence of a painting from an artist’s canvas to the emergence of plants and birds from among the concrete blocks and buildings of a city. Hiking Underground is an engrossing narrative, original in its conception, and so powerful that it will forever change the way you pay attention to the world around you.”

– Emily Martin, author of Experiments of the Mind: From the Cognitive Psychology Lab to the World of Facebook and Twitter

HIKING UNDERGROUND

Nothing happens, and everything happens …

Written under the star of motherhood