Book review: Mr Splitfoot

IN THE 1970s, an orphaned boy and girl called Nat and Ruth develop an unusual bond to survive the agonies of being raised by a religious cult — and the pair harness Nat’s apparent ability to channel the dead as a means of escape.

Decades later, Ruth appears at her pregnant niece Cora’s house, mysteriously mute, and the pair set off on a bizarre pilgrimage across New York State.

In her third novel, US author Samantha Hunt deftly twists these two stories around each other, interspersing a third-person chapter from ‘the past’ with Cora’s first-person narration of her travels, to underline the parallels between the superficially separate narratives.