Literary Fiction Western

High school math teacher Chelsea Gardner has the perfect plan. She's tired of dating all the wrong men, and after years of frustration, she's developed a foolproof list of requirements for finding "the one". Bar owner Sebastian "Bash" Palmer finds Chelsea beautiful, smart, and fun, but he thinks her list is ridiculous. Intent on proving that Chelsea is looking for love in all the wrong ways, he offers to help her find the "perfect" man. Chelsea knows that Bash isn't the right guy for her - he barely meets one of her criteria - but there's something about him that has her yearning.

Crooked Sheriff Harry Gauge rules the town of Trinidad, New Mexico, with an iron fist. His latest scheme is to force rancher George Cullen into selling his spread and to take Cullen's beautiful daughter Willa for his bride - whether she's willing or not.

Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.

From the best-selling novelist of the American West, comes a novel of romance, danger, and life along the trail.

Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm where the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground he and his family have lived.

A classic story of imperiled love on the western frontiers of 19th-century America. While a battle rages between two outlaw gangs in a remote Utah canyon, Jim Wales struggles to rescue Helen Herrick, who has been captured and held for ransom. Robbers' Roost tells the story of their personal struggle to escape the clutches of the murderous outlaws while simultaneously safeguarding their passion, one that is not likely to survive the beautiful, yet deadly, terrain and people of the old American West.

Cripple Creek, Colorado, is the most infamous sinkhole of vice and violence in the Rockies. The town's steamy bordello row and gambling halls beckon to Brad Medford, who is set on tasting all the pleasures a young man can find. He sets out across the long miles to reach Cripple Creek and prove himself a man, but misfortune takes a hand when Brad's path crosses that of a renowned gunfighter. It turns out Brad's first meal in Cripple Creek may be his last.

In 1909, struggling to farm his remote homestead and raise three sons, widower Oliver Milliron desperately needs help. A housekeeper’s ad in a Milwaukee newspaper, “Can’t cook but doesn’t bite,” leads him to hire her sight unseen. When perky Rose Llewellyn arrives, she brings along her brainy brother, Morris. Though Rose whistles through her work at the Milliron house, and Morris becomes teacher at the one-room school, these two newcomers conceal a past that is colorful and infamous.

1886: Jesse Montgomery is beginning to feel restless. Though he’s grateful to his friends Colin and Emma for helping him get on his feet again after a few bad choices and some hard living, surely the Lord doesn’t want him to stay in Apple Grove forever. Doesn’t the Almighty have plans for this reformed rowdy cowboy to build a life of his own? When an unscrupulous cattle baron tries to steal Amish land, Jesse intervenes and is wounded. Lovely Katie Miller, the young healer in the district, attends to him while trying to guard her heart.

At the age of 48, film critic David Denby returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to re-experience the core humanities courses he had taken as a freshman 30 years before. Facing the question of what he really knows, Denby re-examines the besieged Western classics, ranging from Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles to Dante, Nietzsche, and Woolf. What relevance do the writers and thinkers of the past have to our current life? The answer surprised Denby and will surprise and enlighten his listeners.

Cornelia Rose — armed with her midwifery training, as well as literature and history knowledge, thanks to older brothers’ education and books — embraces the opportunities that life in the metropolis of New York provides. In love and happily married to Obadiah Wright, her life is a fairytale of abundance, but it takes an unexpected turn with Obadiah’s decision to heed the call of the West.

It’s springtime in Oklahoma, and Ernie, an outcast in a group of outcasts, feels uneasy. Nerves at the abandoned summer camp where he and his fellow oddballs are crashing have been on edge since the arrival of a teenager named Coral, unceremoniously dropped off from her family’s minivan one afternoon. Adding to her aura of mystery, Coral doesn’t say a word. Ever.

Hunky cowboy Ace Riley wasn't planning on settling down, but his family had other plans for him. The only way to save his hide, and his playboy lifestyle, is to discreetly marry his best friend, Jasmine King. Fiesty city-girl Jasmine is just helping out her friend - that is, until their first kiss stirs up a whole mess of trouble, and suddenly discretion is thrown to the wind. One hot cowboy, one riled up woman...and they'll be married for a year, like it or not!

Eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin “B .F.” Windes decides to abandon home and trail his father’s path. Thus begins a trip of constant struggle with disease, severe weather, hardship, Indian attack, and death on his lone journey across much of what is now the United States. B. F. spends the next 11 years in gold rush towns in California - first as a barber, then as a physician’s assistant - before departing for the Caribbean at age 19, where he becomes a blockade runner during the American Civil War.

Awardwinning author Robert Flynn delivers a witty and thought-provoking novel about a dying Texas town. When the new highway bypasses it, Wanderer Springs is left to wither in the dust. Will Callaghan, back home for a funeral, remembers the town’s sometimes funny, sometimes painful past, includingthe time he cost his high school the football championship. Will’s remembrances show that the present, however chaotic,is always linked to the past.

All Abigail had to still her fears of the unknown were love, and trust in Ross Gallagher, the handsome, reckless Irishman who had snatched her from her New England family to make her his wife. But Abigail was soon to learn how frail even this man's strength and spirit were in the face of the dangers and terrors of the West. As a captive of a Sioux chieftain, Abigail was fated to experience a living hell.

Screenwriter, actor, producer, and award-winning author Andrew J. Fenady knows the Western genre as few do. Destiny Made Them Brothers follows General Ulysses S. Grant, George Armstrong Custer, and Rebel Johnny Yuma, united by fate and friendship. The elusive one of the bunch, Johnny plays a vital role in Grant’s victory for the Union, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and Custer’s deadly campaigns in the West.

On the top floor of a small hospital, an unlikely piano prodigy lies in a coma, attended to by his gruff, helpless father. Outside the clinic, a motley vigil assembles beneath a reluctant New Mexico winter - strangers in search of answers, a brush with the mystical, or just an escape. To some the boy is a novelty, to others a religion. Just beyond this ragtag circle roams a disconsolate wolf on his nightly rounds, protecting and threatening, learning too much.

In Uncompahgre, the number one best-selling, multiple award winning, third novel of the Threads West Series, the time nears when the first of the next generation of Threads West characters will be born of the brave men and courageous women of different origins who have come so far and risked all. The men and women of the saga, having reached their initial destination, pre-Denver, Cherry Creek, are each faced with life-altering decisions.

1860 - Palo Pinto, Texas: Under the spectacular glow of a Comanche moon, a family is slaughtered, their homestead torched. Nineteen-year-old Barleigh Flanders survives the terrifying raid. Fiercely determined to rebuild, she seizes an opportunity meant for another. It's a foolhardy, reckless scheme. Desperate, near penniless, it's her only hope.