Lucky Turtle

Bestselling author Bill Roorbach is back with another novel of big, memorable, and deeply lovable characters. In his newest novel, he tells an intensely immersive love story undone by the foolhardiness of youth and the ways in which race and class can dictate one’s life.

In this “thrilling” love story (Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers and Five Tuesdays in Winter), a teenage girl with a checkered past finds instant chemistry with a mysterious stranger.​

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When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law, living off their resounding love, Lucky’s vast knowledge of the wilderness, and a little help from some friends.
 
But they can run from the outside world for only so long, and the consequences of their naïve fantasy of a future together—and circumstances shaped by skin color—will keep them apart for decades. Cindra gets trapped in a relationship, safely if stultifyingly suburban, where she is both cosseted and controlled by a man who claims to be her rescuer. But for Cindra, there will never be another Lucky, and she dreams of one day finding him, the only man she’s ever fully trusted, her soulmate.

Page-turning, full of vivid characters, delicious suspense, and ultimately joy, Lucky Turtle is a big- hearted, deeply engrossing love story from one of our most entertaining and perceptive writers.