Roadsouls

Roadsouls

Betsy James

#4580 of 8,085 books · #383 in Young Adult

Shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (2017).

Roadsouls explores the power of art and creativity for transforming not only one's own life but also the world one lives in. Timid Duuni has spent her life as abused and guarded property. Blind, arrogant Raím is determined to be again what he once was: hunter, lover, young lord of the earth. Desperate to escape their lives, the two lift up their hands to the passing Roadsoul caravan, and are--literally--flung together naked. Each of them soon learns that saying "yes" to the Roadsouls is more than just accepting an invitation to a new life--it's a commitment that can't be reversed. For Duuni and Raím, nothing is as it was. Lost to their old lives, hating each other, they are swept out of their cruel old certainties into an unknown, unknowable, ever-changing world of journey and carnival, artists and wrestlers and thieves. Behind them, inexorable, pads a lion. Inexorable, too, is Duuni and Raím's inevitable encounter with it, an encounter that will change everything.