The Ploughmen: A Novel

About this book

An NPR Best Book of 2014 A Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection A "bleak and brilliant" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) debut novel "one of the finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory a book that stands alongside Richard Fords Rock Springs Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping James Welchs Fools Crow." (William Kittredge) Steeped in a lonesome Montana landscape as unyielding and raw as it is beautiful Kim Zupans The Ploughmen is a new classic in the literature of the American West. At the center of this searing fever dream of a novel are two mena killer awaiting trial and a troubled young deputysitting across from each other in the dark talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload so brutally adept at his craft that only now at the age of 77 has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration and Valentine Millimaki low man in the Copper County sheriffs department who draws the overnight shift after Gloads arrest. With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own. Their uneasy friendship takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence that yokes together two haunted souls by the secrets they share and by the rugged country that keeps them.