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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Watson was an infamous brute who ruled his remote patch of Florida with an iron fist. He had no problem killing those who got in his way, and was even rumored as the murderer of legendary outlaw Belle Starr. By 1910, Watson’s neighbors had endured enough. They greeted him as he returned home and promptly gunned him down.

Welcome to Travers Corners, a dusty Montana town, where nothing much has happened since Herbert Hoover stopped for gas. Travers Corners, like most small towns, has no newspaper, no radio station; but here, large trout - no better than large trout, fictitious trout - await the angler. And apart from spreading gossip outside the McCraken’s General Store, the residents of Travers Corners love nothing more than fly fishing. Scott Waldie’s delightful cast of characters breathes life into this tiny, out-of-the-way town.

One man finds himself torn between two cultures in this sweeping tale of frontier life in post–Civil War era Texas. In the years following the American War Between the States, the once vacated military presence in west Texas is on the rise to protect the waves of settlers moving into the region. Living peaceably with the Mescalero Apache, half-breed former military scout Holton Lang promotes the tentative harmony between the US cavalry and the Native American population.

Twenty-five-year-old Rose McMurray may be beautiful, smart, and capable of running her family's ranch at Whispering Mountain, but she's backed away from marriage three times without giving anyone reasons. Everyone thinks she is a coward, afraid of any adventure, including falling in love. She's never done a single wild or reckless thing in her life...until now. Duncan McMurray, like Rose, was adopted into the family. As a Texas Ranger, he swears he'll never settle down and marry.

Bo Mason, his wife, and his two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks his fortune in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running throughout the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.

From the blood he spilled during the Civil War to his beloved wife, who died in childbirth, and his daughters, who were taken by the flu, ex-Texas Ranger Josiah Wolfe thought he had seen enough death for one lifetime. Now, with an infant son and a heart full of pain, he's rejoining the Rangers as part of the Frontier Battalion. But first, his captain needs him to escort Charlie Langdon to trial. Wolfe and Langdon had a long history together as both lawmen and soldiers. Wolfe knows his old friend has to pay. But the ride to the hangman's noose isn't going to be easy...

In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they've both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since. Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades—a trail of shattered souls that eventually leads him to Theo, a dying sculptor in rural New Mexico, who knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is.

The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can have never imagined.

When Nolan Sackett met Penelope Hume in a cantina at Borregos Plaza, the girl immediately captured his attention. That she was heir to a lost cache of gold didn’t make her any less desirable. But Penelope isn’t the only one after her grandfather’s treasure; Sylvie, Ralph, and Andrew Karnes, distant relatives with no legal claim to the gold, are obsessed with claiming the Hume fortune for themselves. Their all-consuming sense of entitlement recklessly drives them to ambush and murder.

This epic tale sweeps across continents and time, hovers over a key era in American history, and deftly realizes the humanity of a whole cast of characters. Told through flashbacks and alternating points of view, The Last Crossing is about redemption, about seeking and finding, about human feelings and strengths, about personal honor, and about that moment in life when we must decide to cross over and surrender to love.

Fifteenth-century Oakham, in Somerset; a tiny village cut off by a big river with no bridge. When a man is swept away by the river in the early hours of Shrove Saturday, an explanation has to be found: accident, suicide or murder? The village priest, John Reve, is privy to many secrets in his role as confessor. But will he be able to unravel what happened to the victim, Thomas Newman, the wealthiest, most capable and industrious man in the village? And what will happen if he can't?

McEban looks at the woman sleeping beside him. Her name is Gretchen. She's married to Bennett, and Bennett is McEban's best friend. But McEban has loved Gretchen forever - since they were children growing up on adjacent ranches in Wyoming. What neither man knows is that Gretchen will soon leave her husband in pursuit of a new life. When both decide to follow her on an odyssey across the American West, their journey forces truths and reveals the mystical, sometimes fatal bonds of loyalty and love.

Deadwood, Dakota Territories, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepreneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane.

Award-winning author Mark Spragg writes about the American West with unmatched skill and vision. In Bone Fire Spragg weaves the tale of Ishawooa, Wyoming, a city marred by the realities of modern life. Sheriff Crane Carlson is having enough trouble with his pot-addled and alcoholic wife when he finds a teen murdered in a meth lab. Violence seems to be exploding all over the small town, but even as the situation spirals out of control, Carlson finds moments of compassion and beauty.

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.