Gallatin Canyon - Softcover

"Marvellous... Muscular, idiomatic and shot with unexpected humour, each is a portrait of flummoxed masculinity" (Observer)

"I don't know of another writer who can walk Thomas McGuane's literary high wire... He can describe the sky, a bird, a rock, the dawn, with such grace that you want to go see for your self; then he can zip to a scene so funny that it makes you laugh out loud" (New York Times)

"It is the skill with which McGuane zeros huge cultural movements down to small flights of character that makes him one of the funniest and most acute American novelists" (Guardian)

"One of America's most important literary writers, whose prose style has been compared to such American sensibilities as Hemingway and Faulkner" (Los Angeles Herald Examiner)

"One of the most original American novelists on either side of the Mississippi" (Time)

Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives uncannily recognisable and unforgettably strange: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gathers at the bedside of its dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores.

Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country, McGuane's signature landscape: a father tries to buy his adult son out of virginity; a convict-turned-cowhand finds refuge at a ranch in ruination; a couple makes a fateful drive through the perilous gorge of the title story before parting ways.

McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.

The stories of Gallatin Canyon are alternately comical, dark, and poignant. Rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which McGuane is celebrated, they are the work of a master.