Evelyn in Transit
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 20, 2026
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A crystalline short novel about defying expectations, hitting the road, and seeking the right way to live.
Radically open-minded, formidably strong, and unusually clear-eyed about herself and others, Evelyn Bednarz has always been a misfit. She’s easily bored, unsuited to life at school, asks odd questions about faith and time, and sees through conventions others take for granted. Seeking to be true to herself, she hitchhikes across the American West taking odd jobs.
In distant Tibet, another life unfolds as remote from Evelyn’s as can be: the life of a boy named Tsering, raised as a Buddhist monk in the mountains of Tibet, who eventually becomes a high lama.
And yet, their lives are strangely linked—as Evelyn discovers when a trio of Buddhist lamas show up at her door to announce that her five-year-old son Cliff is the seventh reincarnation of the illustrious Norbu Rinpoche, recently deceased. The lamas’ visit sets off a family crisis and a media firestorm over Cliff’s future.
Written in a spare, precise style of extraordinary beauty, full of surprising humor and luminosity, Evelyn in Transit delivers much-needed insight and compassion about humanity’s strivings for transcendence, and what it might mean to “live the right way.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Guterson (The Final Case) offers a moving account of the entwined lives of an American woman and a Tibetan monk. Evelyn Bednarz grows up in the 1960s feeling restless in her small Indiana town. At 18, she leaves home and hitchhikes across the country. Interested in Buddhism, she stops at a Buddhist retreat center in New Mexico, where she carries heavy limestone to help build their temple in exchange for a place to stay. Back on the road, she meets a man named Scott in a bus station. They travel together and become lovers, until he makes the abrupt decision to leave her. She then discovers she's pregnant and heads back home to Indiana to raise her son, Cliff. A parallel narrative follows Tsering Lepka, who's raised by monks in the Tibetan mountains and declared to be the sixth incarnation of their monastery's late leader. Unsure if he can spend the rest of his life on a throne, he leaves for the U.S., where he translates Tibetan manuscripts for a Seattle professor. A few years later, Evelyn receives unexpected and miraculous news that might link Cliff, now five, with Tsering. The narrative feels a bit aimless, but the ending, in which Evelyn finally finds a sense of purpose, is deeply satisfying. The author's fans will appreciate this subtle tale of spiritual seeking.
