Shadow Moon has served his time and is counting the days until he can go home to his wife, Laura, and rebuild his life. Then, just before his release, he learns that Laura is dead, killed in a car accident, and the future he'd been holding onto vanishes. On the flight home he meets a grifter who calls himself Mr. Wednesday — a man who already seems to know everything about Shadow, and who offers him a job as bodyguard and errand-runner.
Wednesday, it turns out, is far more than he appears, and the work takes Shadow on a strange journey across back-road America, recruiting a fading pantheon of old gods: deities carried to the New World in the hearts and rituals of immigrants, now dwindling as belief moves on. Arrayed against them are the new gods of television, the internet, celebrity, and the market, and a war is coming that could remake the spiritual landscape of the country. As Shadow is drawn deeper into the conflict, secrets about Wednesday, about the coming battle, and about Shadow himself begin to surface.
Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Awards, Neil Gaiman's modern classic is a genre-blurring blend of fantasy, mythology, road novel, and Americana — strange, violent, funny, and haunting.
