Riassunto:
In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape, in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of love and fate, and of heritage threatened by progress.
Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before hera canyon as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” 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 familiarthe 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. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent.
Recensione:
Praise for Painted Horses:
National Bestseller
One of Amazon’s 100 Best Books of 2014
#1 Indie Next Great Read for August 2014
A Barnes & Noble Discover Selection
Amazon Debut Spotlight for August 2014
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.” Boston Globe
Malcolm Brooks’ novel has the hard thrill of the West, when it was still a new world, the tenderness of first love and the pain of knowledge. This book is a gripping, compulsively readable page-turner.” Amy Bloom, author of Away
Painted Horses reads like a cross between Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, with a pinch of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient for good measure. . . . An earnest, romantic novel.” The Dallas Morning News
Lush, breathtaking prose that expertly captures the raw essence of an American West known for its wide-open spaces and unbridled spirit. . . . Masterful.” San Francisco Chronicle
Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy, and the wisdom and elegance of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Painted Horses is its own work, a big, old-fashioned and important novel.” Rick Bass, author of All the Land to Hold Us
Evocative . . . Brooks’ prose rings true.” The Seattle Times
Painted Horses is evidence that the many-peopled, colorific, panoramic, fully-wraparound, pull-you-in-by-the-heels, big-questions, literarily deft Great American Novel’ still lives.” Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves
Grandly romantic . . . Blood. Sex. War. Equine Expertise. Past versus Progress. Money versus Love and Sacred Places. One can almost hear Hollywood’s horsemen rumbling toward this tale.” Orion
Painted Horses is a wonderful novel full of horses, archeology, the new West, and two fascinating women. Malcolm Brooks should be lauded for this amazing debut. Very fine.” Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog
Painted Horses vividly evokes an earlier time, a place and a way of being that is at the cusp of great change. In his gift for the language of horses and the culture of horsemen, Brooks will inevitably recall Cormac McCarthy. And like Ivan Doig in Bucking the Sun, he mines one of the darker veins in the mythology of the American West” The Washington Post
A love song to the Western frontier, Painted Horses is a new, truly American, work of art.” San Antonio Current
Malcolm Brooks has the same intuitive understanding of women that his character John H has of horses. Painted Horses is a beautiful, sensual, authentic novel. A western novel that is about so much more than the West, it is an exquisite, enthralling debut.” Lily King, author of Euphoria
The next great western novel . . . Vivid and often romantic . . . The past echoes through the canyons of the West in this richly layered first novel.” The Daily Beast
Ambitious and affecting . . . A sweeping and dramatic saga.” Big Sky Journal
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