Literary Fiction Western

An almost-true story about a small town in Texas that ought to exist if it doesn’t, with characters like Sam the Lion, the delectable Jacy, and Ruth Popper, the coach’s wife. Set in a small, dusty, Texas town, The Last Picture Show introduced the characters of Jacy, Duane, and Sonny: teenagers stumbling toward adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.

Jim Stegner has seen his share of violence and loss. Years ago he shot a man in a bar. His marriage disintegrated. He grieved the one thing he loved. In the wake of tragedy, Jim, a well-known expressionist painter, abandoned the art scene of Santa Fe to start fresh in the valleys of rural Colorado. Now he spends his days painting and fly-fishing, trying to find a way to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. He works with a lovely model. His paintings fetch excellent prices. But one afternoon, on a dirt road, Jim comes across a man beating a small horse, and a brutal encounter rips his quiet life wide open.

In 1903 a mysterious, desperate young woman flees alone across the west, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand. Two vengeful brothers and a pack of bloodhounds track her across the western wilderness. She is 19 years old and half mad. Gil Adamson's extraordinary novel opens in heart-pounding midflight and propels the listener through a gripping road trip with a twist - the steely outlaw in this story is a grief-struck young woman.

Carlin Reed lives in fear, off the grid, moving from place to place. So Battle Ridge, Wyoming, a small town in the middle of nowhere, seems like a good place to lie low for a while. But after becoming cook and housekeeper to cattle rancher Zeke Decker, Carlin suspects that she’s made her first mistake. Rugged, sexy, and too distracting for his own good, Zeke is pure temptation mixed with something deep and primal that makes Carlin feel almost safe. Soon things are getting way too hot in the kitchen.

William Bonney, a.k.a. "Billy the Kid", killed his first man when he was 12. By the time he was 21 he had, by his own reckoning, slain 19 more. In the intervening years, he had become "Billy the Kid", bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint.

Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels, and his own fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880 New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country.

The Vengeance of Mothers is an audiobook that explores what happens to the bonds between wives and husbands, children and mothers, when society sees them as "unspeakable." What does it mean to be white, to be Cheyenne, and how far will these women go to avenge the ones they love? As he did in One Thousand White Women, Jim Fergus brings to light a time and place in American history, and fills it with unforgettable characters who live and breathe with a passion we can relate to even today.

It is 1917, in that sliver of borderland that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest, handsome, intelligent); Cob (short, heavyset, a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest, thin, ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in Southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula.

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.

A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs' final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms Burroughs' status as one of America's greatest writers. The final novel of the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a Book of the Dead for the nuclear age, an astonishing, profound, and revealing meditation on morality, loneliness, life, and death.

Years after losing one of their best friends to a dare gone wrong, Devlin “Dare” Whiskey continues to live up to his name, endlessly testing fate, while Billie Mancini buried the best parts of herself. Billie is beautiful and tough, and battling demons Dare has no idea exist. But Dare is done watching her pretend to be something she’s not and takes on his most important challenge yet—showing the woman he loves that some dares are worth the risk.

A remarkable collection of stories, Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid characters for which Annie Proulx has become known. In every story in this book, Proulx displays her wit and her knowledge of the West, of history, and, most of all, of characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in tough territory.

Borders of Blood Smoke Jensen has come to Corpus Christi, Texas, to take delivery of 500 horses he purchased from an old friend. That's when a Mexican revolutionary, Colonel Bustamante Keno, brazenly crashes the border, slaughters 22 innocent U.S. citizens in cold blood, and steals a thousand head of cattle - along with two hundred of Smoke's horses. Going where the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers cannot, Smoke crosses the border in hot pursuit of Keno.

He's everything she doesn't need. The quiet horse whisperer whose touch still ignites her dreams - and is everything wealthy Lauren Prescott is not. She can think of a million reasons why she should never ever fall into Sky Fletcher's sure embrace again. Until she clashes head-on with the dangerous complications of her privileged life and needs his protection like air to breathe....

Kade McKettrick's got five mail-order brides-to-be camped out at the local hotel, all more than eager to provide him with the heir that will win him the Triple M ranch. But Kade, the newly appointed marshal, has his hands full with a troublesome outlaw gang. Why, then, is he so easily distracted by pretty "Sister Mandy" - who most assuredly is not the nun she claims to be?

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.

When veiled threats become real, he agrees to hire a discreet security detail. But Devin is shocked to find that the bodyguard is a hard-bodied woman and that he's attracted to the steely-eyed stunner. Former soldier Liberty Masterson's return to civilian life is wrought with challenges until she lands a job with a prestigious security firm. But when she agrees to provide personal protection during a cross-country tour, she doesn't realize she has signed up to masquerade as the playboy star's girlfriend.

When Sullivan Tate escaped from a cult, leaving behind the only life she’d ever known, she thought she’d already endured the most difficult things she’d ever have to deal with. She knew she needed to figure out who she was, but she hadn’t expected to fall for overprotective and sexy-as-hell Callahan “Cowboy” Whiskey along the way.

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.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

New York Times best-selling author Jennifer Chiaverini’s beloved Elm Creek Quilts series here takes listeners back to the Civil War for a powerful tale of husbands, wives, and a nation torn apart. Fervent abolitionism rules the day in 1862 Water’s Ford, Pennsylvania. So when the local men answer Mr. Lincoln’s call to arms, wives are left behind to keep the town functioning. Fortunately, the ladies of Elm Creek Valley have an ingenious plan.