Literary Fiction Western

Paul Bäumer is just 19 years old when he and his classmates enlist. They are Germany’s Iron Youth who enter the war with high ideals and leave it disillusioned or dead. As Paul struggles with the realities of the man he has become, and the world to which he must return, he is led like a ghost of his former self into the war’s final hours. All Quiet is one of the greatest war novels of all time, an eloquent expression of the futility, hopelessness and irreparable losses of war.

Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.

Audie Award, Literary Fiction, 2016. The story of Jack Crabbe, raised by both a white man and a Cheyenne chief. As a Cheyenne, Jack ate dog, had four wives, and saw his people butchered by General Custer's soldiers. As a white man, he participated in the slaughter of the buffalo and tangled with Wyatt Earp.

In the late 1930s, 16-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat lightning - a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there".

Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.

No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river.

Rosie Belmont has been driving me wild for years. The good kind of wild. The bad kind of wild. But mostly the kind of wild that comes with wanting your best friend’s little sister and knowing you can’t have her. After living in the city, she comes blasting back into Rose Hill like a storm. Beautiful, messy, and chaotic. And one wide-eyed desperate plea for a job is all it takes for me to hire her.

Swept away when her wagon train attempts a difficult river crossing, Ruthy MacNeil isn't all that upset at being separated from the family who raised her. All they've ever done is work her to the bone. She prayed for a chance to get away, and then came the raging flood. Alive but disoriented, she's rescued by Luke Stone...so unfortunately, there are more chances to die in her immediate future. Luke is heading home to reclaim the ranch stolen from his family.

Weston Belmont. The man is a shameless flirt. He oozes confidence and masculinity in a way that’s downright distracting. And in bed? He’s addictive. Everything with him is wild and impulsive and I’m desperate to regain some control. But no one has supported me like West does. And no one has ever made me feel as loved as he does either. So, while my brain says settling down with a small-town horse trainer is impossible… my heart says I’m right where I belong.

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction.

Two childhood friends. Two broken hearts. One impromptu road trip to get away from everything. That’s all this was supposed to be. After all, I’ve been living in the friend zone for years now.

That night we were two perfect strangers, the town’s grumpy recluse and a gorgeous girl in the back of a bar. Until we weren’t. Because Nadia Dalca isn’t just some girl. She’s the girl I can’t have. Fourteen years younger than me and completely off-limits. My plan is to stay away, but the universe keeps pushing us together. It’s like some sort of cosmic joke, to give me a taste of something so electric—so real—something that breathed life back into me. Because I can look, but I can’t touch.

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company's finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.

Stefan Dalca is infuriatingly handsome. And annoyingly persistent. We’re supposed to hate each other. But apparently he didn’t get the memo, because he’s been asking me out for years. And I always say no. Until today. Today he has something that I desperately need. Today he’s a savior, and I’m his prize. Our time together starts out as a simple transaction. Three dates. No touching. No telling anyone. And definitely no falling in love.

We join Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow F. Call as they are just beginning to deal with the perplexing tensions of adult life -- Gus, and his great love, Clara Forsythe, Call and Maggie Tilton, the young whore who loves him -- when they enlist with a Ranger troop in pursuit of Buffalo Hump, the great Comanche war chief; Kicking Wolf, the celebrated Comanche horse thief; and a deadly Mexican bandit king with a penchant for torture.

Oklahoma ranch hand Tyler Jenkins is too young, too sexy, and too damn wild to be tied down by any single woman for more than a few steamy hours. Widowed rancher Janie Smithwick is too busy paying off her debts to play rodeo with a reckless young cowboy like Tyler - no matter how hot he gets her.

Emily, the local librarian, has started a writing group, but as the group stumbles through both the fiction and reality of their lives, they’re learning much more than how to write. But Emily suddenly has other things on her mind when a friend from her past shows up in Harmony's library. Now she must deal with a secret she’s kept for fifteen years - a secret that changed her life and threatens to shatter her future. Meanwhile, new lawyer Rick Matheson thinks he’s in charge of his world until accidents start happening all around him.

In Montana Territory, one name above all others strikes fear and hatred in the hearts of the Crow Indians - John Jackson, better known these days as Liver-Eating Jackson. Consumed by grief and rage, the mountain man has brutally killed 10 braves so far in his one-man war of vengeance against the Crow, who murdered his beloved wife. Smoke Jensen knows Jackson by another name - "friend." He's not sure to what extent Jackson's exploits are true - devastating loss and frontier savagery have certainly driven lesser men mad.

The final book of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove tetralogy is an exhilarating tale of legend and heroism. Captain Woodrow Call, August McCrae's old partner, is now a bounty hunter hired to track down a brutal young Mexican bandit. Riding with Call are an Eastern city slicker, a witless deputy, and one of the last members of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorena -- once Gus McCrae's sweetheart. This long chase leads them across the last wild streches of the West....