American Gods

American Gods is a fantasy novel by the British author Neil Gaiman; in 2001, William Morrow released it in the United States and Headline in the United Kingdom. It blends Americana with strands of ancient and modern mythology, and it won the 2002 Hugo and Nebula awards. The novel has been reissued in an author's preferred text with additional material, and it has twice been produced as an audiobook, one of them with a full cast.

Shadow Moon is a prisoner nearing the end of his sentence when the news arrives that Laura, his wife, has died in a car crash; he is released early. The accident killed her alongside his best friend, and the two of them had been having an affair. On the way home he takes a job from a man calling himself Mr Wednesday, who seems to know more about him than he should, and whose offer comes with a wage and a set of errands.

The work is mostly errands, and the people he meets on them are not what they appear to be. Wednesday is assembling allies for a coming war against the newer gods of media, highways and credit, and the older deities he approaches arrived with the immigrants who carried their beliefs and now have far fewer worshippers. Shadow is pulled between the two camps, his dead wife keeps reappearing, and the journey runs from the northern lakes towards a small town in the middle of the country.

Gaiman wrote the novel while living in the United States, and it is structured as a road trip through places that are described with unusual specificity. It is a standalone story rather than the first of a series, and it is told in the third person from Shadow's point of view, with the mythology treated as ordinary American life rather than as spectacle.