The Ploughmen: A Novel

The Ploughmen: A Novel by Zupan, Kim. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780805099515.

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 men―a killer awaiting trial, and a troubled young deputy―sitting 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.