Honor roll:Western books
From AwardAnnals
Each of these Western books has received at least one award nomination. They are ranked by honors received.
See also:
- Works 1–10 of 13
- Show titles only
- Next 10 –>
A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces all the West—legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers—in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths.
Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana—and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream—the attempt to carve out of the last…
Holmes on the Range: A Mystery
- 2007 Anthony-1st Novel nominee
- 2007 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 2007 Shamus-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 18.57
1893 is a tough year in Montana, and any job is a good job. When Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer sign on as ranch hands at the secretive Bar-VR cattle spread, they’re not expecting much more than hard work, bad pay, and a comfortable campfire around which they can enjoy their favorite pastime: scouring Harper’s Weekly for stories about the famous Sherlock Holmes. When another ranch hand turns up in an outhouse with a bullet in his brain, Old Red sees the perfect opportunity to put his Holmes-inspired detective talents to work and solve the case. Big Red, like it or not (and mostly he does not), is along for the wild ride in this clever, compelling, and completely one-of-a-kind mystery.
A Sudden Country: A Novel
A vivid and revelatory novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, A Sudden Country follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption.
James MacLaren, once a resourceful and ambitious Hudson’s Bay Company trader, has renounced his aspirations for a quiet family life in the Bitterroot wilderness. Yet his life is overturned in the winter of 1846, when his Nez Perce wife deserts him and his children die of smallpox. In the grip of a profound sorrow, MacLaren, whose home once spanned a…
The Tree of Life: A Novel
Eighteen months of the life of Thomas Keene, a fictitious 19th-century congregational minister, is traced in this journal-like novel. Having suffered a loss of faith, Keene abandons the East for frontier life in the Ohio wilderness. His account is by turns violent, tender, and erotic. Keene is both a witness to history, describing the many ordinary and horrific details of frontier life (including the conflict between white settlers and Indians), and a man searching for personal meaning in a world without God.
Like a true frontier journal, the novel includes…
The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home in the Florida swamplands by a sching parent’s treacheries, and by a shameful, horrific act that will haunt their dreams for the rest of their days. Joining the swelling ranks of the rootless—wandering across an almost surreal bloodland populated by the sorrowfully lost and defiantly damned—two brothers are separated by death and circumstance in the lawless “Dixie City” of New Orelans, and dispatched by destiny to opposing sides in a fierce and desperate…
The year is 1870, and Fool’s Crow, so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made: resistance or humiliating accommodation. “A major contibution to Native American literature”.—Wallace Stegner.
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn
Custer’s Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history—more than one hundred years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as “one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers,” wrote what continues to be the most reliable—and compulsively readable—account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his meticulous research and novelist’s eye for the story and detail to re-vreate the…
They came west inspired by the boldest American dream. Pioneers whose hands and hearts shaped the proud destiny of a nation. Seven men and thirteen women and children—strangers who shed their blood to build a community out of the Wyoming wilderness. And towering above them all was Bendigo Shafter, a giant of a man whose love and courage were the equal of the mighty land.
Lament for a Dead Cowboy: A Freddie O'Neal Mystery
Freddie and her boyfriend, Sam, attend a gathering of cowboy poets in Elko. While the cowboys and cowgirls are reciting their works, a new verse is added: murder. One of the cowboy poets is found dead, and Freddie’s current amour is the suspect. Suddenly she learns more about Sam’s past than she ever wanted to know.
An Indonesian island is hastily given independence, and a Chinese-educated homosexual who was born on the island returns from his Canadian university to find his life radically altered. The story represents an account of a post-colonial disaster.
- Works 1–10 of 13
- Show titles only
- Next 10 –>
