Back roads

Back Roads is a novel by the American writer Tawni O'Dell, published in 1999 and set in western Pennsylvania.

Harley was nineteen when his mother was convicted, and the novel follows a few months in which he tries to hold a household together on almost no money, to keep social workers and relatives at arm's length, and to be something like a parent to three girls at different ages. His obsession with Callie Mercer, a woman with two children of her own who lives down the lane, gives him something to want, and it gives the book its engine. O'Dell writes the town as a place with no jobs and a great deal of history, and Harley as a narrator who is angry, funny and not entirely reliable about his own motives. The plot is a domestic tragedy with a revelation that reframes what the reader has been told.

It was the author's first novel, and it was chosen for a national reading club in the year after it appeared.