Evelyn in Transit
A Novel
20 January 2026
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
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.”
Reviews
"Unfolds like a beautifully wrapped gift." — Robin Young, NPR's "Here and Now"
"I couldn't stop reading Evelyn in Transit and devoured it in huge and greedy gulps. Every character here is unusual, somehow, and striking: David Guterson seems to catch every voice, and every detail, with such effortless command, and appears happy as a lama to leave everything in its enigmatic truth. An unqualified delight." — Pico Iyer, author of The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
"What a beautiful, strange, soulful spell David Guterson casts in Evelyn in Transit. . . . The modest, intimate, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deadpan funny, always perfectly observed day-to-day details build up and resolve into an inspired portrait that is both cosmic and sacred." — Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers and This Other Eden
"Deeply satisfying. The author’s fans will appreciate this subtle tale of spiritual seeking." — Publishers Weekly
"Guterson delivers a soulful and gentle meditation on the meaning of life and the lengths some of us will go to find purpose. What Evelyn ends up choosing for her young son is practically beside the point. Her charming large heartedness and open mind win the reader over anyway... reflective yet laugh-out-loud funny." — Poornima Apte, Booklist (starred review)
"A sense of play animates this novel; it feels like Guterson had fun writing it, and I certainly had fun reading it." — Bookreporter
"An award-winning author continues to hone his craft… For patient readers with open hearts." — Kirkus Reviews
