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Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Eva Kaminsky
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Michael Crouch
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By:
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Callie Collins
About this listen
Against the vibrant, bluesy backdrop of 1970s Austin, Texas, this shimmering debut follows the collision between hicks and hipsters that ultimately results in tragedy.
Austin, Texas is a town in the throes of social upheaval and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles on its outskirts, is a bar without a crowd. Until a strange new house band transforms it from moribund honky-tonk to thriving blues bar. But are the throngs of people and the rowdy music worth the chaos that comes with them?
Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is told through three perspectives, each of whom is in some ways responsible for the rebirth of Rush Creek and for the violence that follows in the afterbirth. Doug Moser, a country-and-blues guitarist from San Antonio, is seizing his long-awaited chance at fame but cannot turn away from the easy booze and drugs that come with the life. Deanna Teague owns Rush Creek. Her marriage is rocky and so is her sense of herself, but she sees a crack of light if she can just hold it all together. And Steven Francis is a boy who loves too fiercely. He grapples with his sexuality, his God, and his place in a town where he badly wants to belong.
In her heartfelt, electrifying rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming, Collins has captured the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche. The embrace of both inertia and danger, the longing for freedom and anarchy even as we crave a place to belong. Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is a time capsule stuffed with heat and booze, electric guitar riffs and big, empty spaces. It’s about the cost of fame—the real price of attention—and what it can do to a person, to a community, to a whole damn town.
©2025 Callie Collins (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
"Collins debuts with a finely tuned tale of artistic ambition and cultural shifts in the 1970s Texas music scene…Brilliantly conveys the nitty-gritty details of a working musician’s day-to-day. Music lovers will especially dig this.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The old, weird Austin is not dead! It's alive and kicking on the pages of Callie Collins's beautiful novel, a soulful, funny and note-perfect ode to that renegade city and to the righteous music that made it what it is. Fans of Denis Johnson and Willy Vlautin will DEVOUR.”–Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier and The Heart in Winter
"Callie Collins summons 1970s Austin and the Rush Creek Saloon with such tangibility, such heft, they feel as real to me as if I had lived within them. Her debut is gorgeously written and unflinchingly wise. This book and its characters have my heart."–Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas
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