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Honeysuckle Season
Willie Davis
Winner of the 2025 James Baker Hall Book Award
Unfolding over a single day, Honeysuckle Season tells the story of a circus van travelling through Hazard, Kentucky careens off the road, smashing into a line of parked cars, killing a local basketball star. In Honeysuckle Season, twelve different narrators offer their take on that event and its aftermath, each story complimenting, deepening, and undermining the stories that came before.
What Others Say About Honeysuckle Season
A rodeo circus comes to town. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, and it's meant to. Willie Davis is very, very funny, and he is a writer of great depth and tenderness, particularly when it comes to Hazard, Kentucky, "swaddled at the base of exploding, headless mountains." What's a rodeo circus? Davis's polyphonic chorus—melancholic riffers, lost children, drunken dreamers, no-praying reverends, sharp-tongued clowns, bearded ladies, and Bluebeard himself—will tell you, telling themselves and their city into glorious existence. Davis is a master storyteller, with a killer ear and an exuberant heart.
—Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
Willie Davis has crafted an exquisite and engrossing collection of linked stories, set in Hazard, Kentucky, that unfold over the course of one long day after a car accident kills a resident and a member of a traveling troupe of circus clowns. These characters are wonderfully well-drawn. Flawed and funny, odd and wounded, striving and defeated, we get to know them well enough to root for them as individuals and as people who care for each other more than they realize. Readers will be moved, entertained, and delighted by the depth of love evoked for the characters and the place they live. It's a remarkable read.
—Toni Ann Johnson, author of But Where's Home?
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