About the Book
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 her--a canyon "as deep as the devil's own appetites." Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove that 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 US 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.
About the Author :
Malcolm Brooks is the author of the acclaimed novels Painted Horses and Cloudmaker. His writing has also appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal, Outside, Sports Afield, and Montana Quarterly, among others. He was raised in the rural foothills of the California Sierras. A carpenter by trade, he has lived in Montana for most of two decades.
Having narrated over 600 audiobooks in all genres, Julia Whelan is, by industry standards, considered one of the top narrators recording today. She's repeatedly featured on Audiofile's annual Best-Of Lists. She was named Audible's Narrator of the Year in 2014 and is a Grammy-nominated audiobook director. Julia has acquired multiple Audies and SOVAS (Society of Voice Arts) Awards, including for the performance of her own novel, My Oxford Year. She has won dozens of Earphone Awards, The Audie Award for Best Female Narrator of 2019, and was presented with Audiofile's Lifetime Achievement Golden Voice Award in 2020. She attributes her distinctive style of narration to her ongoing passion for literature fueled by her decades of acting experience.
Review :
"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, New York Times bestselling author"
"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, New York Times bestselling author"
"An undisputed ode to the American West."
-- "USA Today"
"Brooks delivers an authentic story, examining in gripping, page-turning prose what it means to live in the West...An outstanding debut novel that will linger in the reader's mind."
-- "Library Journal (starred review)"
"Brooks's debut captures the grandeur of the American West. Catherine Lemay, a former pianist, goes to Montana in the 1950s as a young archeologist to survey a valley for signs of native habitation before the area is flooded by a hydroelectric project...This is a debut that captures a spirit of a place."
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
"Extraordinary...Intimate and sweeping...Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist."
-- "Boston Globe"
"His Montana is vivid, wild, and broad...[a] remarkable debut."
-- "Amazon.com"
"Julia Whelan narrates this modern-day Western with panache and strength...Whelan delivers the stark descriptions of Montana with feeling and draws the listener into the atmosphere. She provides deep empathy for Catherine as she makes a choice that will affect many lives, especially her own."
-- "AudioFile"
"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, New York Times bestselling author"
"Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical, and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy's Borderlands 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, award-winning author"
"Set in an American West of the 1950s but carrying vestiges of the nineteenth century, and with Indian artifacts and the ancestry of wild horses going back even earlier, much of this novel, like its milieu, has a timeless feel...Vividly drawn atmosphere and strong characters will keep the reader engaged."
-- "Booklist"
"There is both great beauty and muted sorrow in Brooks' descriptions of the wild Montana landscape and John H's vanishing way of life...Painted Horses vividly evokes an earlier time, a place, and a way of being that is at the cusp of great change."
-- "Washington Post"
"Wonderful...Stirring descriptions of horses and Western landscapes echo the characters' preservationist motives. Julia Whelan portrays the many characters of the novel deeply and distinctly."
-- "Library Journal (audio review)"
