Painted Horses

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