Paperback : £10.01
"The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . ."
Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother's debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband's folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land.
Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named "dead line" demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods-and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls.
Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead's gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it's also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.
"The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . ."
Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother's debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband's folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land.
Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named "dead line" demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods-and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls.
Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead's gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it's also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.
Robert Olmstead is the author of eight previous books. Coal Black Horse was the winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction. The Coldest Night was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Far Bright Star was the winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award. Olmstead is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant and is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.
“Robert Olmstead gets better with every book. If you know all of
his previous books, you know how startling this fact is, and how
startlingly good this writer is.”
─Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
“The precision and poetry of the author's language have a
paradoxical effect: they make the setting strange and distinct
while imbuing characters and their actions with a particular
immediacy . . . A story about America told through its land and its
animals and its diverse people and, especially, through the
experiences of two vivid, singular, powerful characters. Another
gorgeous, brutal masterpiece from a great American writer.”
─Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“This is a powerful depiction of the brutality of the Old West,
where life was cheap and easily taken.”
─Publishers Weekly
“Fans of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove will enjoy this thoroughly
researched epic Western.”
─Library Journal
“[A] deeply emotional experience . . . Savage Country is an
unforgettable, unflinching, yet distinctly moving story of human
greed and desire.”
─BookPage
“Like so many outstanding novels about the taming of the West,
there is a tragic ambiguity at the heart of Olmstead’s brutal but
beautiful tale of the last buffalo hunt. For a certain kind of
uncompromising yet lyrical writer – think Cormac McCarthy, Larry
McMurtry, or William Kittredge – the West offers a stage for a
special kind of archetypal, almost Shakespearean tragedy, and
Olmstead makes the most of it.”
─Booklist (starred review)
“[Olmstead] has crafted another dark, contemplative western with
his new novel . . . his brutally spare sentences create an
apocalyptic mood reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's Border
Trilogy.”
─ Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“[A] majestic, thrilling tale of a small band of people hunting
buffalo in the territory south of Kansas in the tense and
unpredictable years after the Civil War.”
─Columbus Dispatch
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