Keegan Turpentine has lost his son and been stoned by the Hell Hounds, but he survives. Now, demons are vying for his soul.

A young man’s misadventures from privileged Connecticut to the Wild West and back make for “an entertaining romp through the American 1870s” (Publishers Weekly). Sick and restless, Edward Turrentine Bayard III leaves his Connecticut home in 1871 to recover in a private sanitarium out west. But when his destination proves to be nothing more than a rickety outpost on the Nebraskan plains, he becomes a buffalo skinner instead. After returning East, Ned teams up with a lady cigar-roller named Phaegin, and Curly, a fourteen-year-old coal miner. But soon enough, the newfound trio is wrongly accused of triggering a bomb at a labor rally, and they must flee. With a Pinkerton agent following their every move, the winsome ne’er-do-wells embark on a circuitous escape through northern outposts into Indian country, past the slums of Chicago, and into the boundless Great Plains. En route they become witness to the transformation and growing pains of a burgeoning nation in this comic, picaresque, and prescient look at the growth of an individual and a country. “Warren knows how to spin a tale.” —Booklist

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year The life of Urbain Martien—artist, soldier, survivor of World War I—lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. In War and Turpentine, his grandson, a writer, retells his grandfather’s story, the notebooks providing a key to the locked chambers of Urbain’s memory. With vivid detail, the grandson recounts a whole life: Urbain as the child of a lowly church painter, retouching his father’s work;dodging death in a foundry; fighting in the war that altered the course of history; marrying the sister of the woman he truly loved; being haunted by an ever-present reminder of the artist he had hoped to be and the soldier he was forced to become. Wrestling with this tale, the grandson straddles past and present, searching for a way to understand his own part in both. As artfully rendered as a Renaissance fresco, War and Turpentine paints an extraordinary portrait of one man’s life and reveals how that life echoed down through the generations. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout)