Brooks has fashioned compelling and sympathetic protagonists. Painted Horses sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and progress, often make strange bedfellows.

John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, he lives a fugitive life, driven by pursuit of one last wild thing. John H is a former mustanger with an intuitive genius for breaking horses. From the moment she arrives, nothing is what she expects. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist who’s come to Montana with a huge task before her–a canyon “as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. In Painted Horses, now in paperback, a dauntless woman travels into that untamed landscape in an adventure that will change her life. In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. Hard to forget.” –Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today (4 out of 4 stars) Painted Horses creates several worlds in a seamless and ambitious blend of history, romance, archaeology and nature. The best novels are not just written but built–scene by scene, character by character–until a world emerges for readers to fall into.

The overstory barnes and noble