American Gods

Shadow has done his time and is three days from release when he learns that his wife is dead. Adrift, with nothing to go home to, he takes a job from a one-eyed grifter calling himself Mr Wednesday, whose business turns out to involve a great deal of driving, a certain amount of theft, and meetings in diners and funeral parlours with people who are not people at all. The gods that immigrants carried to America are still here, diminished, working as taxi drivers and undertakers and prostitutes, starved of the belief that once sustained them. Newer powers have risen in their place, gods of media and markets and machinery, and they want the old ones gone. Wednesday is recruiting for a war. Shadow follows him through a landscape of roadside attractions and dying towns, keeping his own counsel, dreaming of a man with a buffalo's head, and returning always to the small snowbound city where he was told to wait. Gaiman's novel is a road book, a mystery and a myth at once, held together by a grieving man who has decided to see where this goes.