In Roadshow, we follow Annie as she leaves her NYC life of bartending and dancing to drive cross-country to Alaska to meet her dying mother.
Literary LitStackers, listen up! Another beauty is in presale now. Astra House invites readers on a journey into Roadshow, a debut novel by Nikki Ervice. Early indications suggest a work of profound literary exploration. Though details remain carefully guarded, the publisher’s evocative description and the cover art hint at a reading experience sure to resonate with discerning readers. Here’s the advance reader word on the book. Consider Roadshow a literary must own and pre-order today.
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About Roadshow
Annie is burning out. She performs at Club X as Dog-Faced Girl, a burlesque act in which she hides her face behind a dog mask. It’s the only way she can dance—her greatest love—while making enough money for rent. But when she receives an unexpected letter from her estranged mother, Vera, postmarked from the remote island in rural Alaska where Annie grew up, her world stops.
Annie’s mother abandoned her when she was only a few days old. Her father, a stoic, workaholic aluminum welder and fisherman, insisted on keeping her mother’s identity a secret. But now, on her deathbed, Vera wants to meet Annie. And with her father recently passed, Annie knows it’s time to return home. So she borrows a Buick LeSabre and sets out on an exhausting journey through the Midwest into Canada. On the road, Annie sleeps where she can. Her attempts at stripping are unsuccessful and humiliating. Her money dwindles. She begins to steal gas.
For a thousand dollars she agrees to dance for a bachelor party at a private lodge on a remote lake. After a delirious, dangerous night that she barely survives, she finally crosses the border into Alaska. Not long after, the LeSabre gives out. Half-broken but drawn on inexorably by the threat of Vera’s death, and a visceral call of her homeland, Annie abandons the LeSabre and hitchhikes to the end of the highway system, across the bay, to the island of her birth, where Vera awaits.
Sexy and fast-paced yet deeply felt, Roadshow explores the power of passion, inheritance, legacy, and class, and the grueling, smiling work of the stage and the hospitality industry.
Roadshow opens with Annie working at a restaurant and dancing at a burlesque club—both cultures are perfectly rendered in Nikki Ervice’s hands. Ervice spent her 20s and 30s working service jobs and dancing in New York City and you can tell: the voice, setting, and characters are authentic and exciting, filling the reader with the adrenaline of being on stage or in the weeds
When Annie hits the road, the novel cracks open, exploring and exposing the wide landscapes of North America. From NYC to Alaska, the reader feels both the smallness of the car and the bigness of the world, and the very real danger of both
While Roadshow is much about doing whatever it takes to follow your passion, it’s also very much about the mother-daughter relationship and about the choices—and sacrifices—a mother may make in order to pursue her dreams
Praise for Roadshow
In Roadshow, “Nikki Ervice redefines the Western in a riveting, atmospheric, unsentimental, and defiantly hopeful debut.”—Tess Gunty, National Book Award Winning author of The Rabbit Hutch
“In Nikki Ervice’s brilliant debut, [Roadshow] a kaleidoscopic array of landscapes and characters come vividly alive as Annie road-trips across the United States and Canada, toward her past and her future. Ervice is a bold and sensitive writer, and Roadshow is a propulsive, visceral book—I couldn’t put it down.”—Helen Phillips, author of Hum and The Need
“Lost but driven, lonely but empathetic, reckless but somehow wise beyond her years, Nikki Ervice’s Annie is a heroine like no other. This road trip [in Roadshow] will never take you where you expect to go—instead, Annie and the people she meets on her journey will bring you right to the heart of what it means to be human in this harsh yet sometimes beautiful world.”—Anna North, Bestselling author of Bog Queen
“Reading Roadshow is like watching someone dance on a knife’s edge. Sexy, exciting, dangerous, desperate, beautiful, with a perfect, moving precision.”—August Thompson, author of Anyone’s Ghost
About Nikki Ervice, Author of Roadshow
Nikki Ervice is the winner of the VQR Emily Clark Balch Prize for fiction. Her work has appeared in The VQR, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is a professional dancer and writer from Alaska and holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. She’s well connected in the New York literary scene.
You can connect with Nikki Ervice on her website.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Astra House
ISBN Hardcover 9781662603655
Pub Date: Nov 10, 2026
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As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, Malaprop’s, Books-A-Million, Audiobooks.com, Chirp, 2nd & Charles, Amazon, NameHero, Envato, and Place-It, LitStack may earn a commission—at no cost to you—when you purchase through our affiliate links. We appreciate the brands we work with, and also appreciate that using our affiliate links may help you find your next great read, a book or two or more, in whatever form, while simultaneously supporting LitStack. When you use our affiliate links, you help keep LitStack running—and for that, we thank you.
