Literary Fiction Western

Zane Grey’s books shoot fast and straight from the hip, hitting readers dead center with thrilling action. His name has become synonymous with western adventure. Because of his killing speed with a revolver, Buck Duane has lived the lone-wolf life of an outlaw. Every day is a struggle against desperate men anxious to prove themselves—and a bigger struggle to hold onto his basic human decency. So when the Texas Rangers offer to deputize him for a dangerous undercover mission, Buck grabs it as his final chance for redemption.

Evangeline Keating came West because she had to: after her husband's passing, she needed to build a new life for her young daughter, and marrying a stranger from Montana Territory was her best chance. After a difficult winter journey, she arrives at an isolated outpost called Springwater Station. But the handsome man who's come for her is not her husband-to-be, and Evangeline soon finds herself thrust into a most inconvenient - and highly improper - arrangement.

In the winter of 1897, a trio of killers descends upon an isolated farm in upstate New York. Midwife Elspeth Howell returns home to the carnage: her husband and four of her children, murdered. Before she can discover her remaining son, Caleb, alive and hiding in the kitchen pantry, another shot rings out over the snow-covered plains. Twelve-year-old Caleb nurses his mother back to health, cleaning her wounds and keeping her fed, before they leave their home to seek retribution on the men who committed this heinous crime.

Cash McLendon has always had an instinct for self-preservation, one that was honed by an impoverished childhood and life with an alcoholic father barely scraping by on the streets of Saint Louis in 1872. He’s always had a knack for finding and capitalizing on the slightest opportunities, choosing the path of financial security over happiness or real friends. He eventually builds himself up from a Saint Louis street urchin to the son-in-law and heir apparent to industrial mogul Rupert Douglass. Though it lacks passion, his life seems securely set: a wife, a career, property, standing.

While portraying life in a new settlement on New York's Lake Otsego in the final years of the 18th century, Cooper deftly explores the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the American experience. He contrasts the natural codes of the hunter and woodsman, Natty Bumppo, and his Indian friend John Mokegan with the more rigid structure of law required by a more complex society.

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.

Dacee June Fortune's mother died when she was eight, and for the next 23 years she stood at her father's side. Even after she married, Daddy Brazos was her strength, her protection, and her idol. Now, daddy is dying.

Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people. The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they've been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger.

At the center of this searing fever-dream of a novel are two men - a killer awaiting trial and a troubled young deputy - sitting across fromeach other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: JohnGload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration; and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff's department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest.

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.

He swept down from the north like a cold blast from hell. His name was Red Pierre and he was riding a vengeance trail.

They said the man he hunted couldn't be beat. But six years of riding outlaw with a wolf-pack left him with a burning hate and a taste for blood.

Now he was going to get the man who shot his father. But he'd need more than hate and a gun. What he really needed was the help of a good woman.

À la frontière du Mexique, le Texas n'est qu'un désert hostile où se risquent quelques rares colons. Pour les protéger, Gus et Call, Texas rangers mal équipés et sous-payés, officient sous les ordres du fantasque capitaine Scull. Le danger est partout : face à eux, le puissant chef comanche Buffalo Hump prouve que son peuple est loin d'être asservi, tandis que de l'autre côté de la frontière, Ahumado, mystérieux brigand expert en embuscades, sème la terreur.

The steady tick of an aged Regulator wall clock and the squeak of an overhead fan turning slowly are soft but insistent, counting down the night, while the high desert thrums like a half-remembered Victrola song. The sounds are below the consciousness of Winchell Dear, an old-time gambler, a Texas poker player on the southern circuit, as he waits for something...something vague that his life of chance tells him is evil and moving his way.

In McGuane's first novel set in his famed American West, Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict. His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick himself is spiraling out of control, into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane's Montana.

Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.

High season is coming to an end, and fishing guide Jake Trent suddenly has some time on his hands. As the ex-lawyer ponders rekindling his romance with park ranger Noelle Klimpton, a surprise call from a long-lost love lights up his phone.

It's been years since law school graduation, when Jake last saw Divya Navaysam. Now a DC lobbyist, Divya wants Jake to come to Washington for a consulting job - immediately.

Gib Douglas has been on the road a long time, with no place to really call home. When he pays a Christmas visit to relatives in Sweetgrass Springs, the last person he expects to encounter is the girl he loved with all his heart, the girl who’d promised to marry him and love him forever…until she betrayed him and married someone else.

Everyone thinks Lacey DeMille is the next thing to royalty, a society girl with beauty, brains and money—but sexy Texas bad boy Devlin Marlowe knows better. Twenty years after being exiled in disgrace for daring to want her, the boy from the wrong side of the tracks has sweet revenge in his grasp...for only he knows that her whole life is built on a lie. And revenge may be more costly than either of them can imagine.

Up-and-coming chef Maddie Collins finds out that her father's life was a lie when she is bequeathed a family homeplace she never knew existed—by the husband of the only woman her father ever loved. A former SEAL, rugged cowboy Boone Gallagher arrives back in Texas to discover that the father who drove him away has struck one last blow. The only place he's ever thought of as home now belongs to a woman who doesn't want it, and he must keep her there for thirty days—or it will be lost to them both.

Brilliant and driven cardiac surgeon Diana Morgan’s whole life centers around her career, now threatened by an injury that may prove insurmountable. She is desperate enough to accept a forced sabbatical to the Davis Mountains of West Texas, where she meets Rafael Sandoval, a former Special Forces medic who understands exactly how it feels to have the life you planned taken from you. After losing his men and nearly losing his life, Rafe has returned home and found a measure of peace combining his Western medical training with the curanderismo or folk healing traditions of his Latino heritage.