The Big Door Prize

Front Cover
Penguin, Aug 31, 2021 - Fiction - 400 pages
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The New York Times bestselling author of My Sunshine Away returns with a gripping and heartfelt novel about a mysterious machine that upends a small Louisiana town, asking us all to wonder if who we truly are is who we truly could be.


What would you do if you knew your life's potential? That's the question facing the residents of Deerfield, Louisiana, when the DNAMIX machine appears in their local grocery store. It's nothing to look at, really—it resembles a plain photo booth. But its promise is amazing: With just a quick swab of your cheek and two dollars, the device claims to use the science of DNA to tell you your life's potential. With enough credibility to make the townspeople curious, soon the former teachers, nurses, and shopkeepers of Deerfield are abruptly changing course to pursue their destinies as magicians, cowboys, and athletes—including the novel's main characters, Douglas Hubbard and his wife, Cherilyn, who both believed they were perfectly happy until they realized they could dream for more....

Written with linguistic grace and a sense of wonder, The Big Door Prize sparkles with keen observations about what it might mean to stay true to oneself while honoring the bonds of marriage, friendship, and community, and how the glimmer of possibility can pull these bonds apart, bring them back together, and make second chances possible, even under the strangest of circumstances.
 

Contents

Section 1
5
Section 2
19
Section 3
28
Section 4
42
Section 5
53
Section 6
64
Section 7
75
Section 8
89
Section 15
220
Section 16
225
Section 17
234
Section 18
246
Section 19
262
Section 20
290
Section 21
311
Section 22
327

Section 9
104
Section 10
118
Section 11
146
Section 12
168
Section 13
188
Section 14
206
Section 23
349
Section 24
355
Section 25
360
Section 26
369
Copyright

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About the author (2021)

M. O. Walsh's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oxford American, The Southern Review, and Best New American Voices, among others. His novel My Sunshine Away was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and currently directs the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans.

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