She lunged the horse forward because that was all that was left to them, the slope too sheer to turn him, the shale his hooves struck loose skidding away, wheeling downward.
Bone Fire
At eighty, Einar Gilkyson has lost his share of loved ones, but still finds his house full. His grandaughter Griff, has dropped out of college to look after him, and his long-absent sister has returned home from Chicago. But Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic, and troubles begin to boil when the sheriff finds a man murdered in a meth lab.
Knopf, 2010
Vintage, 2011
ISBN 978-030747435-3
Independent Booksellers - Indie Next List
MPBA Reading The West fiction selection
Seattle Times Best Books of 2010
Pacific Northwest Indie Bestseller
Mountains & Plains Indie Bestseller
Denver Post bestseller
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Bone Fire is that rare thing, a novel with all the literary virtues of skill and style and pitch that you hope for but also a book that makes you turn pages far into the night to find out what happens.
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About once in a decade a writer captures the unruly West, wrangles it onto the page somehow and holds it down with just the right words.
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A tale teeming with loss, redemption and personal crisis...Spragg’s novel throbs with honest accounts of a Mountain West town - and its habitants - caught between past and present.
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A haunting new novel...A wonder to experience.
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[The] moments of lyrical beauty, emotional depth, and crisp clarity that make it essential reading for anyone interested in the literature of the West.
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A starkly beautiful portrait of the modern West. Spragg is an author with a keen eye for both the poetic splendors and ugly realities of this much-romanticized country.
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Spragg conjures the West with style and gravity. He can burrow into the tightest chambers of the heart, and his belief in family is palpable and moving.
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Spragg understands how the landscape shapes the lives of the characters, as well as the way the modern world encroaches on the landscape.
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Spragg writes with the smoothness of a river stone as he weaves a tale of loss and compassion, loyalty and family, and ultimately, love.
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Spragg is so spot-on when it comes to describing small-town life in the American West, his prose seems to leap off the printed page.
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[A] big-sky slice of life...As slow and shambling as a run-down pickup, but that allows the fine- tuned characters wide-open space to breathe and the grief to become palpable.