A New Directions classic

Hans Christian Andersen Award winner and three-time Caldecott Honoree Peter Sis delivers an epic tour de force and his most beautiful, accessible work to date!

Caught somewhere between the clear-eyed rhapsodies of James Fenimore Cooper and Mao Tse Tung's own Address to the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature, Tuten's The Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a wildly inventive, triumphant novel of great wit and subversion. Out of a revolutionary montage of literary pastiche, comic strips, political rhetoric, film culture, and pop iconography, Tuten has fashioned a funny, caustic and tender romance.

Set in 1954, this is a tale narrated by one Mrs Agnes Hawkins, a plump, forthright and no-nonsense young war widow. Nancy (as she is called) is the calm at the center of the perennial storm in the offices of a struggling London publishing house in the difficult years after WWII. At work and at her seedy boarding house she is involved with a cast of characters ranging from the charmingly useless to the downright unhinged; included an author she rejects and who tries to revenge himself through a quack science known as "radionics" (use of radio waves to influence health).

Dumped by his glamorous Russian girlfriend during dinner at Elaines, and running low on cash, Stone Barrington is having a bad week. So his luck seems to be improving when hes hired to locate the missing son of a very wealthy manlucky because the job pays well, and because the son is hiding in the tropical paradise of Key West. But when Stone and his sometime running buddy Dino Bacchetti arrive in the sunny Keys, it appears that someone has been lying in wait. When Stone very nearly loses his life after being blindsided at a local bar, he realizes that the young man hes been hired to track may have good reason for not wanting to be found. Suddenly Key West is looking less like Margaritaville and more like the mean streets of New York. . . .