The Trackers by Charles Frazier

BOOK SUMMARY

Deep in Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming, where he’s landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office. A wealthy art lover named John 

Long and his wife Eve have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple: Eve left behind an itinerant life riding the rails and singing in a western swing band. Long holds shady political aspirations, but was once a WWI sniper—and his right hand is a mysterious elder cowboy, a vestige of the violent old west.

One day, Eve flees home with a valuable painting in tow, and Long recruits Val to hit the road with a mission of tracking her down. Journeying from ramshackle Hoovervilles to San Francisco nightclubs to the swamps of Florida, Val’s search for Eve narrows, and he soon turns up secrets that could spark formidable changes for all of them.

In The Trackers, singular American writer Charles Frazier conjures up the lives of everyday people during an extraordinary period of history that bears uncanny resemblance to our own. With the keen perceptions of humanity and transcendent storytelling that have made him beloved for decades, Frazier has created a powerful and timeless new classic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, won the National Book Award, the ABBY Award, the Heartland Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by Anthony Minghella in 2003. He is also the author of Thirteen Moons, Nightwoods, and Varina.

REVIEWS

“Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain is the most impressive and enthralling first novel I have read in a long time. It is a magnetic story, ambitious in scope, with richly developed characters and beautiful evocations of landscape. Though set in an earlier time, it is contemporary in the profoundest sense, with resonance of A Farewell to Arms.”

—Willie Morris

“Strikingly beautiful . . . In its vivid evocation of a time and place, its steady storytelling momentum, and its unabashed affirmation of a fiction that takes moral choice seriously, Cold Mountain calls to mind Snow Falling on Cedars.”

—Newsday

“Thirteen Moons brings this vanished world thrillingly to life… One of the great Native American, and American stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Nightwoods is unsettling stuff, tense and eerie and brutal. . . .Nightwoods is no typical thriller. It hits hard because you come to care so much about the characters, all of them drawn with that precise enchanted prose. By the book’s climactic scenes in the shadowy mountain forest that gives Nightwoods its title, the unhurried, poetic suspense is both difficult to bear and impossible to shake.”

—Entertainment Weekly