Connecting the 2,369 miles of U.S. Route 1 from Ft. Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida, the Route One Reads initiative is a partnership between 16 affiliate Centers for the Book to promote books that illuminate important aspects of their states or commonwealths for readers travelling the major and meandering highway. The initiative was launched at the 2015 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
For more information, visit Route1Reads.org or follow #Route1Reads on Twitter.
For the fourth consecutive year, Florida Center for the Book is
participating in the Route One Reads initiative. In 2018, the theme of
the initiative is romance, and the selected book to represent Florida is
Stiltsville: A Novel by Susanna Daniel.
About the Book
One sunny morning in 1969, Frances Ellerby finds herself in a place called Stiltsville, a community of houses built on pilings in the middle
of Biscayne Bay. It is the first time the Atlanta native has been out on the open water, and she's captivated. On the dock of a stilt house,
with the dazzling Miami skyline in the distance, she meets the house's owner, Dennis DuVal—and a new future reveals itself. Against a vivid
South Florida background, Susanna Daniel’s
Stiltsville offers a gripping, bittersweet portrait of a marriage—and a romance—that deepens over the course of three decades.
About the Author
Susanna Daniel’s debut novel,
Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham prize for best debut work published in 2010, and her second novel,
Sea Creatures, was a Target Book Club Selection.
Susanna is a co-founder, with author Michelle Wildgen, of the Madison Writers’ Studio. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Writers’ Workshop and a Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the UW Institute
for Creative Writing. Her writing has been published in Newsweek, Slate, One Story, Epoch, and elsewhere.
Susanna was born and
raised in Miami, Florida, where she spent much of her childhood at her family’s stilt house in Biscayne Bay. Today, she lives in Madison,
Wisconsin, where during the long winter she dreams of the sun and the sea, and of jumping off the stilt house porch at high tide. She is at
work on a third novel.
The diverse reading list created by Route One Reads highlights each individual State Center for the Book while celebrating the East Coast as a whole. By participating in Route One Reads, readers can travel across 15 states and the District of Columbia without taking a single footstep, or load selected books into the car for a literary road trip.
The full list of featured books for the 2017 Route One Reads initiative is available along with a map of participating states at Route1Reads.org.
Route One Reads is a partnership between the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, and its affiliates in: Connecticut; Delaware; Florida; Georgia; Maine; Maryland; Massachusetts; New Hampshire; New Jersey; New York; North Carolina; Pennsylvania; Rhode Island; South Carolina; Virginia; and Washington, D.C.
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