Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The man looked up. He nodded, and smiled, and conveyed to LuEtta—who had a sympathetic heart, it was her downfall, she saw the best in everyone but could never figure out how to get it out of a person, she could just see it glittering away inside doing nobody any good, this was the lesson of her marriage—a radiating, painful shyness. He had a face plumper than the rest of his body. LuEtta fought the urge to touch him.

"Nice to meet you," she said. "I hear you're—you're married to Bertha."

"She tell you that?" He shook his head, but smiled again. "Well, I've never known her to be wrong."

"It's a pleasure to meet you," she said.

"Yes," he said. Then he corrected himself. "Yes, a pleasure. For me. As well as you. Excuse me." She thought he was about to stand up, but instead he put his pipe in his mouth and returned to the book.

He was definitely not a white man.

When Bertha was done, he stood to join her. They did not speak, they did not touch. They walked out not together but adjacent. How they always moved through the outside world together: close enough to not lose track of one another though neither glanced the other's way, far enough to be blameless strangers if they passed the wrong sort of people. On the street at the same time as though by coincidence, but the sort of coincidence arranged by the gods, and between them a space of such evident magnetism that no reasonable person would have breached it.

Bowling was new to the territory: superstitions grew like ivy on the walls of Truitt's Alleys.

It's bad luck to spit in a bowling alley.

It's bad luck to drink beer in the middle of bowling one frame; wait till the pinbody resets the pins before you touch your glass.

If the bowler on either side of you has a bad leave, wait till she finishes the frame to bowl, or you too will be cursed with a bad leave.

It is terrible luck to be born in a bowling alley.

Bad luck to eat fish in a bowling alley: eat only beef, venison, fowl.

A nonbowler who spends time in a bowling alley must never pick up a ball: he is as a priest in a maternity ward, on entirely different business, and must remain pure.

Do not speak of a nonbowler in a bowling alley. Worst sort of luck.

(For who? The bowlers, the pinbodies, the nonbowler himself?)

That's enough now.

Where had he been? Mary Gearheart heard he'd been out walking. (Her father ran the vaudeville house: she could sniff out the freak acts.) He had walked from Boston to New Brunswick, Canada, where he was from, and then back, a distance of 1,100 miles. He was a pedestrianist: he'd won walking races, though this had not been a race. It had taken him a hundred days altogether, but that included ambling. Ambling and rambling, swims in rivers, visits to relatives. It was a religion. It was a disorder. It was a habit, like drinking or bowling. He was a physician, educated in Glasgow. Did he walk to Glasgow? In a way: he walked for miles on the ship that took him there. Did he speak Scottish? Scottish is not a language, Mary. I think it is, I heard a Scotsman speak it.

The women pictured him sloshing across the surface of the ocean in seven-league boat-bottomed boots. They pictured him striding to Canada, a fishing pole shouldered like a rifle.

He might have been deaf, the way he never flinched at the sounds of the alley. He had a double chin so replete that strangers wanted to test its bounce with a finger, or wished he'd grow a beard for modesty's sake. "Dr. Sprague is from the Maritimes," Truitt said whenever she introduced him. She said this as though The Maritimes were a chronological location, not geographical. In a way she believed that this was the case, though she couldn't have explained it.

"That's my husband," Bertha Truitt said, to the police who wondered whether she needed help, the greengrocer, the ladies of Truitt's Alleys, anyone who asked. He did speak, at the same rumbling pitch of the rolling balls, maybe why she loved him.

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.