Ron Rozelle's new novel, Touching Winter, is a four-part evocation of memory and place and the yearning for home. Each part of the novel begins with a meditation on one aspect of the protagonist's life as he watches the unpredictable weather of East Texas. When Will was a young boy, he and his grandfather enjoyed being out in the spectacular East Texas storms. These sessions taught Will many things about life--ranching, weather, character; how to be a man--and bound Will to the family land and to his grandfather. Only at the ranch does Will feel like the person he was, or would like to be, before wrong decisions turned his life down an entirely different path. A powerful, early romance turned disastrous, but the relationship haunts him. To compensate for lost love, Will carved a niche for himself in the competitive concrete industry, inventing a technique to make mixing trucks more efficient and becoming wealthier than he could have dreamed. His marriage to a Houston socialite is thin and brittle, unsatisfying for his wife, Lauren, and for himself. Their daughter Aimee lives in California, as far away from her family as possible. As Will ages, he turns to the ranch as a place of clarity in times of crisis, eventually moving back there entirely. He exchanges the public life he and Lauren led in Houston for the simplicity of walks along the rustic fence, lunch at the town's only diner with old friends, and long evenings on the porch watching the stars. Along the way, a fierce, red-breasted hawk comes to represent the spiritual for Will, and he is forced to face the consequences of earlier decisions.

Marking the debut of a young writer of enormous talent, "The Winter Zoo" is a sexy, hilarious novel of wayward young expatriates--and the difference between doing good and feeling good.

In Illumination in the Flatwoods, Joe Hutto unveiled the secret lives of wild turkeys to great critical acclaim, which resulted in the Emmy Award–winning PSB documentary My Life as a Turkey. Now Hutto has done it again. Touching the Wild is the enchanting story about one man who has lived with a herd of mule deer in the Rockies for almost seven years. Due to the intense curiosity of one groundbreaking deer, and the resulting introduction to an entire herd, Joe Hutto has been allowed unprecedented access and insight into the minds and behavior of this special animal. Spending every day embedded among the herd, he develops an uncanny connection with the deer, witnessing individual and group dynamics never before observed and recorded, unveiling just how much we have in common with these delicate beings. Each season brings joy as fawns are born, and heartache as hunters, predators, development, and a pollution all take their toll. The mule deer of the West are in trouble, and Hutto is their most fervent advocate. Touching the Wild is proof that we have so much to learn from wild animals about their world, ourselves, and the fragile planet we share. Full color photos throughout.