Superb... [a] remarkable love story... Spragg finds poetry (and humor) in silence, revealing his characters' depth of feeling in what they don't say and how they don't say it.

A uniquely, moving detailed road map of the human soul.

Spragg evokes these doomed characters and the land they inhabit with an achingly beautiful lyricism. Like Annie Proulx and Gretel Ehrlich, he's a writer who makes Wyoming's high country so familiar it feels like the reader's own native ground.

What at first seems like a standard love story is soon revealed to be something much more epic - two hardened men, battling each other and their own demons, in the bleak, unforgiving landscape of the West. [A] tale of obsession, desire and rage...Spragg is a precise and practiced observer of the natural world.

McEban is likeable in spite of the lie at the middle of his life; he is a man who remembers and dreams, mostly about Gretchen. Bennett gives the novel its punctuation: He is an unpredictable picker of fights, a barroom brawler, a howlingly rejected man.

The dialogue is especially effective: spare, witty and dry as the desert...His prose is as detailed and evocative as a crisp black and white photograph.

An unforgettable first novel...Expertly, he spins a long love story to Wyoming and the tough, do-it-right-or-don't-do-it-at-all people who live there. He gets the dialogue exactly right. He gets the barroom jokes and dust-ups exactly right, and he gets the run-ins with state troopers and deputy sheriffs exatly right. There's not a word that needs changing.

A pick-up truck odyssey...Lyrical one moment, gritty the next.

Mark Spragg proves that language can still be created anew in his poetic debut novel...Both the emotional depth and the linguistitc play of Spragg's novel are surprisingly fresh and satisfying...[A] vivid novel that places Spragg firmly in the company of such Western writers as Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner.

Spragg knows the Rocky Mountain West better than almost anyone, and he's made of it a compelling metaphor for the rest of the country... Mark Spragg owns one of the truest and most original new voices in American letters.