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...
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel (Milkweed Editions, $25) by Debra Magpie Earling upends the orthodox view of the Lewis and Clark saga, which paints Sacajewea as Toussaint Charbonneau’s wife and ignores the fact that he bought (or gambled for) her when she was...
In Headwaters: The Adventures, Obsession, and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman (Patagonia, $27.95), Dylan Tomine casts a line into his life of angling adventures with vivid detail, political and environmental astuteness, and wonderfully infectious humor. The narratives collected here take the reader all over the...
Avis DeVoto takes her rightful place alongside her husband, Bernard, in Nate Schweber’s lively and engrossing biography, This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild (Mariner Books, $28.99). Previous biographers have given us Bernard, best known today...
Perma, Montana doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. That’s how tiny and insignificant the world-at-large considers this spot on the Flathead River, 30-some miles as the raven — or in this case, the magpie — flies, south of Niarada, population 27, also just as unknown to...