This Place the Gods Touched Earth (Montana Arts Council and Montana Historical Society Press, $19.95) brings together a strong and vibrant sample of work by all 11 of Montana’s past and current poets laureate, since the honor was established in 2005 by the Montana State...
Callan Wink takes another step in establishing himself as a major writer of the American West with his new work, Beartooth: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau, $28). Wink, the author of two previous books, Dog Run Moon (a short story collection) and August (a novel),...
Sheriff Jules Clement of the fictional town Blue Deer, Montana has returned, at long last, and fans of Jamie Harrison’s mystery series will be delighted with the latest installment, The River View: A Jules Clement Novel (Counterpoint, $28). As with earlier books in this series,...
All journeys are journeys of the soul, as well as the body and mind. This is delightfully true for Ammalie, the hero of Laura Pritchett’s new novel, Three Keys (Dell, $20). Leaving her empty Chicago home — she’s recently widowed, middle-aged, and estranged from her...
Current Montana poet laureate Chris La Tray blends personal memoir and Indigenous history in Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home (Milkweed Editions, $30). Raised with only hints of the Métis and Anishinaabe (Chippewa) heritage of his father’s side of the family, La Tray...
Dave Carty captures the spare poetry of Montana landscapes, specifically the Shields River Valley, in his poignant novel Red is the Fastest Color (Guernica World Editions, $18.95). He takes the reader through the seasonal changes that dominate life in this region, and those mirrored in...
The Refugee Ocean by Pauls Toutonghi (Simon & Schuster, $27.99) is the kind of novel for which the form was invented. It creates sweeping, lush worlds, fully inhabited by its unforgettable characters. It spans continents and lifetimes with careful detail and balance. It leaves the...
The man behind numerous iconic images of the Rocky Mountain’s stunning natural features comes into full focus in Tim McNeese’s William Henry Jackson’s Lens: How Yellowstone’s Famous Photographer Captured the American West (TwoDot, $31.95). Jackson’s role in swaying Congress to establish our first national park...
To call Sun House (Little, Brown, and Company, $35), by David James Duncan, a novel is akin to calling the sun a decent-sized campfire. This book, coming in at nearly 800 pages, commands attention. But the caliber of writing, at any length, would cause the...
Christine Byl’s Lookout (Deep Vellum, $25.95) offers a stunning portrait of a family firmly rooted to the land in northwest Montana. Told through numerous points of view, in authentic voices, and with a poetic ear for language, this is the kind of novel one becomes...