Classic and Best-selling Western Novels

Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry's return to the kind of story that made him famous -- an enthralling tale of the nineteenth-century west. Like his bestsellers Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Comanche Moon, and Dead Man's Walk, Boone's Lick transports the reader to the era about which McMurtry writes better and more shrewdly than anyone else.
Told with McMurtry's unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius, the novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. Without knowing precisely where he is, they set out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile Indians as they go. With them are Shay's siblings, G.T., Neva, and baby Marcy; Shay's uncle, Seth; his Granpa Crackenthorpe; and Mary Margaret's beautiful half-sister, Rose. During their journey they pick up a barefooted priest named Father Villy, and a Snake Indian named Charlie Seven Days, and persuade them to join in their travels.
At the heart of the novel, and the adventure, is Mary Margaret, whom we first meet shooting a sheriff's horse out from underneath him in order to feed her family. Forceful, interesting, and determined, she is written with McMurtry's trademark deftness and sympathy for women, and is in every way a match for the worst the west can muster.
Boone's Lick abounds with the incidents, the excitements, and the dangers of life on the plains. Its huge cast of characters includes such historical figures as Wild Bill Hickok and the unfortunate Colonel Fetterman (whose arrogance and ineptitude led to one of the U.S. Army's worst and bloodiest defeats at the hands of the Cheyenne and Sioux) as well as the Cecil family (itself based on a real family of nineteenth-century traders and haulers).
The story of their trek in pursuit of Dick, and the discovery of his second and third families, is told with brilliance, humor, and overwhelming joie de vivre in a novel that is at once high adventure, a perfect western tale, and a moving love story -- it is, in short, vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the west, and his unrivaled eye for the telling detail.
Boone's Lick is one of McMurtry's richest works of fiction to date.

Boone's Lick

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Excellent condition from a smoke free home. 

A Novel

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land. Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become—in the eyes of the law—a kidnapper himself.

News of the World

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Cornelius Suttree renounces the values held by his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat among the depraved residents on the banks of the Tennessee River

Suttree

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Set against the bitter frontier strife between Texans and the Comanche, Texas Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call battle Buffalo Hump, the enigmatic war chief, and Gus' long-time nemesis, Blue Duck

Comanche Moon

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Last Buckaroo

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Canyon O’Grady #7: The King of Colorado 

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The Strange siblings are on the hunt for justice in this wild double installment of bestselling Western author Ralph Compton's Rough Justice series.

RIDERS OF JUDGMENT: In her guise as "Danny Duggin," Danielle Strange has spent the past two years hunting down the outlaws who murdered her father. Reunited with her brothers, the twins Tim and Jed, she plans to take her war across the border into Mexico--unaware she's being pursued by a U.S. federal marshal....

Saul Delmano comes from a powerful family of cattlemen whose business stretches from the Southwestern territories into Mexico. He's put a $2,000 reward on Danny Duggin's head, tempting every outlaw and bounty hunter across the West to try to collect it. But the cry of vengeance has been shouted out--and only justice can silence it.
 
DEATH ALONG THE CIMARRON: Disguised as "Danny Duggin," Danielle Strange hunted down the merciless cutthroats who murdered her father. Now the feared gunslick has hung up her trademark twin Colts--and given up her secret identity--to make something out of her Texas ranch.
 
But then a passel of hard cases rides into town and all hell breaks loose. And when the vicious gunmen kill one of Danielle's old saddle pals, she knows it's time for Danny Duggin to ride the vengeance trail again....
 

Ralph Compton Double: Rough Justice #2

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Tom Healy was in trouble. His theatrical troupe needed to get to Alder Gulch, Montana, and the weather was turning. Andy Barker promised Tom he could get them there safely, but Tom was reluctant to trust him: he had the lives of three actresses to consider, and his personal feelings for Janice further heightened his concern. Then King Mabry showed up. Although Tom didn’t like the way he looked at Janice, he could see that Mabry made Barker uneasy. So Tom invited Mabry to join them. Tom was right to be worried, because Barker had a plan. He knew that the wagons carried something more than actors and scenery. He and his men were going to steal it any way they could. And that included murder.

Heller with a Gun

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Stories

RIDE ALONG INTO DANGER

Traveling under an alias, the last thing gunman Clip Haynes wanted was attention. But Basin City needed a town-taming marshal, and a cold-blooded murderer was hiding behind Haynes's real name. Now Haynes was coming out of hiding to protect his honor, save a town, and catch a killer-even if it cost him his life.

Lou Morgan was as tough as they came. But it wasn't just the money or the challenge that motivated him to take on a suicide job involving a buried Spanish treasure and two greedy killers. It was love for a beautiful senorita who had left him for dead years ago.

It's not easy being the new schoolma'am in town . . . especially when you're a man. But Van Brady isn't quite the tenderfoot he seems, and before he's through he'll teach a few hard cases a lesson they'll never forget.

From the rough-and-tumble streets of San Francisco to the dry desert plains of Texas, from a roughshod gambler willing to wager his own life on a single bet to a killer with a heart, here are stirring tales of the Old West as only Louis L'Amour can write them, tales of men and women risking their lives, fighting their wars, and standing tall on the American frontier.


Long Ride Home

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Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, this is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling Border Trilogy.

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex–Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

A harrowing story of a war that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, No Country for Old Men is a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.

No Country for Old Men

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Most Recent Western Listings

Louis L'Amour Novels

Non-Fiction Books About the American West

Western Romance Novels

#hardcover #desire #adventure #california #lasvegas #mexico #western

A Lambda Literary Award Finalist, 2020.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The New York Times, Real Simple, Electric Literature, and more.
 
"Cinematic . . . The spaces she creates for her characters . . . have the aura of realms." --The New York Times Book Review

A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West.

Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriel's nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. Meanwhile, Julius is testing his fate in Las Vegas, working at a local casino where tourists watch atomic tests from the roof, and falling in love with Henry, a young card cheat. When Henry is eventually discovered and run out of town, Julius takes off to search for him in the plazas and dives of Tijuana, trading one city of dangerous illusions and indiscretions for another.

On Swift Horses is a debut of astonishing power: a story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promises them everything.

On Swift Horses

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#fiction #westerns #hardcover #western #louislamour former library book with markings 

Volume Three

The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: The Frontier Stories

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#westerns #fiction #historicalfiction #hardcover #reesesbookclub #historical 

Outlawed

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A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK * INDIE NEXT SELECTION * LIBRARY READS SELECTION * AMAZON EDITORS' CHOICE * WASHINGTON POST BEST OF THE YEAR

The "terrifying, wise, tender, and thrilling" (R.O. Kwon) adventure story of a fugitive girl, a mysterious gang of robbers, and their dangerous mission to transform the Wild West.

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada's life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women. But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she's willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

Featuring an irresistibly no-nonsense, courageous, and determined heroine, Outlawed dusts off the myth of the old West and reignites the glimmering promise of the frontier with an entirely new set of feminist stakes. Anna North has crafted a pulse-racing, page-turning saga about the search for hope in the wake of death, and for truth in a climate of small-mindedness and fear.

Border Trilogy (1)

Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather's death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure

All the Pretty Horses

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#thedarktower #paperback #western #westerns #fiction #action #fantasy 

The Gunslinger

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba “An impressive work of mythic magnitude that may turn out to be Stephen King’s greatest literary achievement” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), The Gunslinger is the first volume in the epic Dark Tower Series. A #1 national bestseller, The Gunslinger introduces readers to one of Stephen King’s most powerful creations, Roland of Gilead: The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which mirrors our own in frightening ways, Roland tracks The Man in Black, encounters an enticing woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the boy from New York named Jake. Inspired in part by the Robert Browning narrative poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” The Gunslinger is “a compelling whirlpool of a story that draws one irretrievable to its center” (Milwaukee Sentinel). It is “brilliant and fresh…and will leave you panting for more” (Booklist).

The Dark Tower I

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#paperback #fiction #westerns #historical 

True Grit

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Captain Call, a bounty hunter hired to catch bandit Joey Garza, assembles a group of unlikely assistants and travels to Crowtown, Texas

Streets of Laredo

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Frontier Stories

Tales of danger, hardship, and adventure in the Old West.

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Classic and Best-selling Western Novels

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Larry McMurtry

Boone's Lick

Paulette Jiles

News of the World

Cormac McCarthy

Suttree

Larry McMurtry

Comanche Moon

Mackey Hedges

Last Buckaroo

Jon Sharpe

Canyon O’Grady #7: The King of Colorado

Ralph Compton; Ralph Cotton

Ralph Compton Double: Rough Justice #2

Louis L'Amour

Heller with a Gun

Louis L'Amour

Long Ride Home

Cormac Mccarthy

No Country for Old Men

Louis L'Amour Novels

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On Swift Horses

Louis L'Amour

The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: The Frontier Stories

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Outlawed

Anna North

Outlawed

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All the Pretty Horses

Stephen King

The Dark Tower I

Charles Portis

True Grit

Larry McMurtry

Streets of Laredo

Larry McMurtry

Streets of Laredo

Louis L'Amour

The Collected Short Stories of Louis l'Amour, Volume 5