Painted Horses

Book excerpt: The national bestseller that “reads like a cross between Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms” (The Dallas Morning News). In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates the untamed landscape of the West in the 1950s. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her. Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar—the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. “Engrossing . . . The best novels are not just written but built—scene by scene, character by character—until a world emerges for readers to fall into. Painted Horses creates several worlds.” —USA Today (4 out of 4 stars) “Extraordinary . . . both intimate and sweeping in a way that may remind readers of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient . . . Painted Horses is, after all, one of those big, old-fashioned novels where the mundane and the unlikely coexist.” —The Boston Globe