Painted Horses
A Novel
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4.3 • 16 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The national bestseller that “reads like a cross between Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms” (The Dallas Morning News).
In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates the untamed landscape of the West in the 1950s.
Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her. Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar—the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows.
“Engrossing . . . The best novels are not just written but built—scene by scene, character by character—until a world emerges for readers to fall into. Painted Horses creates several worlds.” —USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)
“Extraordinary . . . both intimate and sweeping in a way that may remind readers of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient . . . Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist.” —The Boston Globe
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brooks's debut captures the grandeur of the American West. Catherine Lemay, a former pianist, goes to Montana in the 1950s as a young archeologist to survey a valley for signs of native habitation before the area is flooded by a hydroelectric project. Catherine fell in love with archeology while digging at Roman sites in Britain as a student, but now in the ruggedly masculine West, she almost immediately butts heads with her assigned guide, Jack Allen. She also falls under the spell of John H., an artist and lover of horses who leads a nomadic life in the badlands. Catherine's arduous search of the valley is contrasted for much of the novel with John H.'s harrowing life story. When the two meet, intrigue sparks respect, which eventually flares into passion. The middle of the novel bogs down with lavish description ("The tilt of the planet had outrun the legs of winter and dawn climbed early now over the wide lip of the world"), and the third act, in which Catherine's findings threaten the balance of money and power in the community, follows a predicable course. But on the whole, this is a debut that captures a spirit of a place.
