This info about Mark's Spragg's new novel, Bone Fire, comes from the Knopf spring 2010 catalogue (via Fans of Mark Spragg Facebook page):Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic nowadays, as the sheriff, Crane Carlson, is reminded when he finds a teenager murdered in a meth-lab. His other troubles include a wife who's going off the rails with bourbon and pot and his own symptoms of the disease that killed his grandfather.
Einar Gilkyson, taking stock at eighty, counts among his dead a lifelong friend, a wife and his only child, and his long-absent sister has lately returned home from Chicago after watching her soulmate die. His granddaughter, Griff, has dropped out of college to look after him, though Einar would rather she continue with her studies and her boyfriend, Paul. Completing this extended family are Barnum McEban and his ward, Kenneth, a ten year old whose mother (Paul's sister) is off marketing enlightenment.
What these characters have to contend with on a daily basis is bracing enough, but as their lives become even more strained, hardship foments exceptional compassion and generosity, and along with harsh truths come moments of hilarity and surprise and beauty.
No one writes more compellingly about the modern West than Mark Spragg, and Bone Fire finds him at the very height of his powers.
Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, and the novels The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. All three were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in Wyoming.
