Larry Watson

Documents nine periods in United States history: Colonial period to 1763 ; Era of revolution: 1763-1783 ; New nation: 1783-1815 ; National expansion: 1815-1860 ; Civil War and Reconstruction: 1860-1877 ; Guilded age: 1877-1899 ; Progressive Era and the twenties: 1900-1928 ; Depression and war: 1929-1945 ; Cold War and beyond: 1946-

Sonja Skordahl, a Scandinavian immigrant, finds herself torn between her husband, Henry, and Ned Weaver, an internationally famous artist who uses her as a model, in a novel set against the backdrop of rural Wisconsin.

Mercer County Sheriff Jack Nevelson investigates when a recent high school graduate and her former principal are killed in a fatal accident at the bottom of Sprull Hill.

"From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them ..." So begins David Hayden' s story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David' s understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David' s uncle Frank, a war hero and respected doctor; and the Haydens' Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations turn the family' s life upside down as she relates how Frank has been molesting his female Indian patients. As their story unravels around David, he learns that truth is not what one believes it to be, that power is abused, and that sometimes one has to choose between family loyalty and justice.

Quand l'art pratiqué devient une valeur telle que fondent toutes les fidélités. [SDM].

"Calvin Sidey is a cowboy of the old-school, no-guff sort--steely, hardened, with his own personal code. It's the 1960s, and he's living off the grid in a stifling trailer on the prairie when his adult son, Bill, seeks his help. A mostly absentee father, and a virtual no-show as a grandfather, Calvin nevertheless reluctantly agrees to stay with his grandchildren for a week. He decamps for his son's dark and musty basement, to the small town where he once was a mythic figure, and soon enough problems arise: a boy's attentions to seventeen-year-old Ann are increasingly aggressive, and a group of reckless kids portend danger for eleven-year-old Will. Calvin only knows one way to solve a problem: the Old West way, in which scores are settled, ultimatums are issued, and your gun is always loaded. In the changing culture of the 1960s, Calvin isn't just a relic, he's a wild card and a threat."

In North Dakota in 1951, years after losing her son in a horse riding accident, Margaret Blackledge seeks to retrieve her grandson from the daughter-in-law who ran off with another man but finds her efforts challenged by her reluctant husband and the boy's stepfamily.

On Thanksgiving Day 1962, the shooting of a young woman sets off a chain of unsettling events in Willow Falls, Minnesota, all revolving around Matthew Garth, who becomes obsessed with the shooting victim and with the lavish lifestyle of a local doctor's family.