The wintering place : a novel /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Dakota Territory, 1867. The O'Driscoll brothers have survived a Sioux massacre, but younger brother Michael is gravely wounded. The deserters are fleeing north with Tom's lover, Sara, when they come upon a sheltering rock by a stream down off the Bozeman Trail. If there is game here, they may survive the winter.

"Wanted" posters appear everywhere along the trail. The likenesses do not resemble the brothers, but their uniforms give them away. Enter any town, and they will have to shoot their way out. The rock and the river become their safe place, and when spring comes, their paradise. But the world seeks its way to them, and even in paradise human nature makes its own trouble. In this follow-up to his acclaimed novel The Wolves of Eden, Kevin McCarthy tells a story of three very human characters battling to survive in a vast, beautiful, and unforgiving landscape.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

McCarthy follows up Wolves of Eden with another tough tale of the Dakota Territory, one as bloody and visceral as a Sam Peckinpah film. It's 1867 and Irish immigrants Thomas Sugrue and his younger brother, Michael, are mired in a brutal struggle for survival. Both have fled a murder charge in their home country and served with Union forces in the American Civil War. Tom and his lover Sara--who is half French, half Indigenous, and whom Tom recently liberated from abusive captors by more killings--have just rescued Michael from a near-scalping and sure death following a Sioux onslaught at their fort. Over the next few months, a series of events cast the three in sharp relief against a treacherous environment that is as unforgiving as it is lawless: a deadly encounter with a pair of cutthroat fur trappers, a tense dispute with two Crow braves over rights to a pair of elk carcasses, and a final violent reckoning of unresolved grudges from the past at a frontier trading post. McCarthy effectively alternates chapters cobbled from a journal kept by Michael with stark omniscient accounts, thus combining an intimate tone with an unflinching appraisal of the territory's harsh terms of engagement. This is a solid entry in the revisionist western fiction canon. (Nov.)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Kevin McCarthy is the author of the historical novels Wolves of Eden, Irregulars, Peeler, and, most recently, The Wintering Place. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.