Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

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Pub Date Aug 05 2014 | Archive Date Sep 30 2014

Grove Atlantic | Grove Press

Description

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 richly textured, sweeping 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 her—a 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 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.

Reminiscent of Jim Harrison, Wallace Stegner, Thomas McGuane, Annie Proulx, and Michael Ondaatje, Painted Horsessends 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.

Advance Praise

“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 is the kind of finely tuned and literary love story they don't make much of anymore. Fans of Jamie Ford’s novels, or Jim Harrison’s, will be enthralled by Malcolm Brooks. He evokes a time and a place tinged by an autumnal sun, the brass thunderclap of things ending and beginning again. Painted Horses will carry you away.”—Doug Stanton, author of the New York Times bestseller Horse Soldiers

“In Painted Horses, Malcolm Brooks tells a spectacular story. An archeological adventuress searches for signs of a pre-conquest culture in the rugged depths of a Montana canyon while trying to fend off construction of a hydroelectric dam. Siding with inhabitants of the Crow Reservation, she thinks the dam, intended to flood a geological treasure, will be an ecological and cultural disaster. Real and painted horses, danger and defeat, and an enduring love affair. Kept me up through a few nights.”—William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Willow Field

“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

“I read Malcolm Brooks’ new novel, Painted Horses, with fascination, then amazement. Big, thrilling, poignant, astonishingly confident, it is the work of a master rather than that of a first-time novelist. With a story that moves from the bombed cities and battlefields of Europe to the wild badlands of Eastern Montana, and an eye for everything from the quality of a horse to the techniques of painting and archaeology, it will draw you in and leave you dreaming. I have rarely read a novel that realized a world so well.”—Stephen Bodio, author of An Eternity of Eagles and Querencia