The Last Kind Words Saloon

The Sisters Brothers

Patrick deWitt · 379 pages

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, El

Warlock

Oakley Hall · 471 pages

Sharpshooter Clay Blaisedell is called to Warlock, a wild frontier town, to restore order, but the more he tries to fix the town's problems, the more the town plunges into chaos all around him.

Shane

Jack Schaefer · 159 pages

Shane is about a lone man of high principle,who gets caught up in a range war between the cattlmen and farmers.He sides with the farmers when the cattlemen hire a professional gunfighter named Wilson,a man against which the farmers have no chance.Shane alone must save the day.Frontier justice at its best.Circa late eighteen hundreds.

News of the World

Paulette Jiles · 264 pages

In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives

Mr Norris Changes Trains

Christopher Isherwood · 240 pages

"On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur Norris, an irresistibly comical fellow Englishman wearing a rather obvious wig and nervous about producing his passport at the frontier. So begins a friendship conducted in the seedier quarters of the city, where Norris runs a dubious import-export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary, his creditors

The Crossing

Cormac McCarthy · 425 pages

Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought. In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves run

Peace Like a River

Leif Enger · 313 pages

"Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy

Nobody's Angel

Thomas McGuane · 227 pages

A former Army tank captain and sometime whiskey addict returns to his family's Heart Bar Ranch in Montana to find many problems.

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles · 464 pages

""In all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight.this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility." - Kirkus Reviews (starred) From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility--a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel With his br

The Power of the Dog

Thomas Savage · 283 pages

First published in 1967, Thomas Savage's western novel about two brothers and the competition between them when one marries now includes an afterword by Annie Proulx.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Ron Hansen · 304 pages

Friendship becomes rivalry and the quest for fame becomes obsession.

The Chili Queen

Sandra Dallas · 292 pages

"Life may have been hard on Addie French, but when she meets friendless Emma Roby on a train, all her protective instincts emerge. Emma's brother is seeing her off to Nalgitas to marry a man she has never met. And Emma seems like a lost soul to Addie - someone who needs Addie's savvy and wary eye. It isn't often that Addie is drawn to anyone as a friend, but Emma seems different somehow. When Emm

Half Broke Horses

Jeannette Walls · 313 pages

It is 1970 in a small town in California. "Bean" Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decay

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton · 320 pages

Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but

When The Legends Die

Hal Borland · 216 pages

When his father killed another brave, Thomas Black Bull and his parents sought refuge in the wilderness. There they took up life as it had been in the old days, hunting and fishing, battling for survival. But an accident claimed the father's life and the grieving mother died shortly afterward. Left alone, the young Indian boy vowed never to return to the white man's world, to the alien laws that h

The Gate of Angels

Penelope Fitzgerald · 167 pages

Young Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at St. Angelicus College in 1912 Cambridge, falls in love with the dangerously mysterious Daisy, whom he awakens next to one morning after a freak accident.

Falling from Horses

Molly Gloss · 337 pages

"In 1938, nineteen-year-old ranch hand Bud Frazer sets out for Hollywood. His little sister has been gone a couple of years now, his parents are finding ranch work and comfort for their loss where they can, but for Bud, Echol Creek--where he grew up and first learned to ride--is a place he can no longer call home. So he sets his sights on becoming a stunt rider in the movies and rubbing shoulders

Waiting for the Mahatma

R.K. Narayan · 256 pages

The Sword of Honour Trilogy

Evelyn Waugh · 710 pages

"This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cru

True Grit

Charles Portis · 215 pages

True Grit is Charles Portis' most famous novel--first published in 1968. It tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash money. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest availab

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Michael Ondaatje · 106 pages

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, by Michael Ondaatje, won the 1970 Governor General's Literary Award. Ondaatje's hauntingly disturbing evocation of the life and death of the 19th-century American outlaw placed him in the forefront of the new generation of Canadian poets emerging in the 1970s. The Collected Works commences with a list of 20 men killed by Billy the Kid and a foreshadowing of hi

The Shootist

Glendon Swarthout · 208 pages

A shootist is what later came to be called a gunman, a killer, in the early days of the lawless Wild West. This is the story of one such gunman, who is dying of cancer in a rooming house in El Paso. When news gets around of his approaching death, everyone wants to be in at the end, and wheel around him like vultures, not quite hesitating to keep their distance. The book is a marvel of brevity, fil

Jacob the Liar

Jurek Becker

The Time It Never Rained

Elmer Kelton · 416 pages

This is a novel of people and times of a real, honest to goodness tragedy in Texas history. It is the story of the time and the people who live and worked in Western Texas during the severe prolonged drought of the 1950's. The ranchers and business people who lived and survived the time and the loss of their homes and business because of circumstances beyond their control. A real life story abo