This is a fun-read western, but it is not pulp fiction. It’s a classic human conflict in a western setting, with serious philosophical issues. Think of “The Ox-Bow Incident,” the classic novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, but as readable as a Louis L’Amour western. A young man finds himself an outsider among the rough hands of a western ranch in Idaho during the Great Depression. An impassable rift between the kid and the cowboys happens on a scorching hot day in August, when men’s tempers are boiling. The kid’s working partner that day is violently killed when he impulsively and violently confronts a vagrant believed to be trespassing across the ranch. Critical events during the seconds leading to the cowboy’s violent death are not clear. Unable to save his friend, the kid rides for help and a posse forms. The kid believes the cowboy’s provocation led to his own death. But the ranch hands in the posse are convinced the tramp caused the death, so they insist on hanging him. Serious issues beset the kid and the ranch during the three difficult days after the death. The personal conflicts will be man-making for the young cowboy. The question is whether the posse will reflect and deal with its conflicts in a civilized way.

Nathan and his family join a group of other Quakers sailing to America, but the voyage is plagued by suspicion, sickness, and superstition.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The story of Cynthia Ann Parker and the last days of the Comanche In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians from her family's settlement. She grew up with them, mastered their ways, and married one of their leaders. Except for her brilliant blue eyes and golden mane, Cynthia Ann Parker was in every way a Comanche woman. They called her Naduah—Keeps Warm With Us. She rode a horse named Wind. This is her story, the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever. It will thrill you, absorb you, touch your soul, and make you cry as you celebrate the beauty and mourn the end of the great Comanche nation.

In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. The singer turning this and that way, as if watching the song itself --the words to the song--leave him, as he lets each go, the wind carrying most of it, some of the words, falling, settling into instead that larger darkness, where the smaller darknesses that our lives were lie softly down." --from "Riding Westward" What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? What is the difference, Phillips asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

No book has a better claim to have invented the myth of the American West. It is 1871 in Cottonwoods, Utah. This is the story of the gunman, Lassiter, and the Mormon rancher, Jane Withersteen.