Beartooth - by Callan Wink (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Economist 40 Best Books of 2025 * Apple's Best Books of the Year * Hudson Best of the Year * Kirkus Best Books of 2025 * Wall Street Journal Best Mysteries of 2025

"Skip Yellowstone for this rawer version of the West."--The New York Times Book Review

"Readers who brave the wilderness with these mismatched brothers--and a supporting cast of eccentric characters--are in for a grand adventure rendered in rich, atmospheric prose. This outdoor thriller wouldn't be misplaced on a shelf alongside certain tales by Faulkner, Hemingway or Steinbeck."--Wall Street Journal

"This taut, compelling novel explores the great outdoors--and a realm of moral uncertainty. . . . A ferociously gripping book."--The Economist

Two brothers in dire straits, living on the edge of Yellowstone, agree to a desperate act of survival in this taut, propulsive novel reminiscent of the works of C.J. Box, Donald Ray Pollock, and Larry McMurtry.

Thad and Hazen live off the grid, struggling with debt after the death of their father. Thad, the elder brother, is the capable one, while Hazen is a dreamer, more in tune with the wilderness than with people. Then a shadowy out-of-towner called the Scot appears--dressed in a kilt and with a mysterious young woman in tow. He makes the brothers a proposition that is both lucrative and a federal crime--removing resources from Yellowstone National Park, a scheme that becomes more appealing when their long-gone mother shows up, raising troubling questions about the past. A contemporary tale with a timeless feel, Beartooth explores the bonds between brothers, the natural world versus society, and what happens when everything you believed to be true is turned on its head--for worse and for better.

Review Quotes

"Readers who brave the wilderness with these mismatched brothers--and a supporting cast of eccentric characters--are in for a grand adventure rendered in rich, atmospheric prose. This outdoor thriller wouldn't be misplaced on a shelf alongside certain tales by Faulkner, Hemingway or Steinbeck." -- Wall Street Journal

"This taut, compelling novel explores the great outdoors--and a realm of moral uncertainty. . . . A ferociously gripping book."--The Economist

"Any reader seeking a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount's TV hit Yellowstone would be well advised to pick up Callan Wink's new novel, Beartooth. . . . These action-filled passages are absorbing, elegantly written and sometimes thrilling. . . . An original and impressive piece of work."--The New York Times Book Review

"An atmospheric and superbly executed drama . . . Thriller elements are present and skillfully realized in the narrative, but Wink proceeds far more interestingly, developing Beartooth into an expansive and convincing novel of family relationships. . . . Wink's descriptions of nature are superbly precise and vivid, never anthropomorphizing the world and its non-human inhabitants. The western trope of the strong, self-reliant individual contending with a lyrically described environment and its gnarled human inhabitants, driven by violent impulses and private moral codes, is upturned by Wink's close, convincing and unsentimental observations of people and nature. . . . This makes Beartooth an emotionally rich and compelling piece of storytelling."--The Guardian

"Like [Scott Smith's] A Simple Plan, Beartooth is a gripping, rural-set adventure novel in which brothers make a terrible decision that permanently alters their lives and their relationship to each other. . . . Wink is a spare, exacting writer. It's not until Beartooth reaches its raw conclusion that you realize there's not a word out of place and that virtually all the events in the brothers' doomed lives seem to have been forecast by the ominous first sentence."--The Minnesota Star Tribune

"In this transportive novel of two brothers living on the margins in the Beartooth mountains of Montana . . . Wink mesmerizes with his descriptions of nature and the men's survival skills, and he successfully portrays the brothers' humanity in their dance between struggling for dominance and wanting to support each other."--Publishers Weekly

"Wink's highly readable second novel . . . is at once thoroughly wild and thoroughly intimate. The modest poetry of Callan's prose does justice both to the beauty of the wilderness and to the complexity of the brothers' relationship."--The New Statesman

"A novel of impeccable control and unflinching darkness. And then a glimmer of hope."--Kirkus (starred review)

"A combination of talented writer and knowledgeable outdoorsman, Wink reminds me of Peter Heller. But A Simple Plan--Scott Smith's '93 thriller-turned-'98 movie--is the most obvious comparison here.--The Boston Globe

"Wink knows his setting inside out. . . . Definitely a writer to stick with."--Daily Mail

"A dual consciousness--of the sublime and exalted nature of the universe, and of its utter dispassion--flows through the novel."--The Irish Times

"Tense and gripping."--The Gloss

"One of the best and fiercest heist stories since A Simple Plan . . . Beartooth is unstoppable, the literary treasure you've been looking for."--Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"Beartooth shows a Montana that is fueled by grit, vengeance, elbow grease, and desperation. Wink has a poet's eye for the landscape, and his characters are as textured as the mountains they call home."--Steven Rinella, author and host of The MeatEater Podcast

"I found something to love on every page of Beartooth, a moving and tightly drawn novel about two brothers trying to eke out a hardscrabble, sometimes illegal living on the edge of Yellowstone after their father dies. Callan Wink is a truly gifted writer."--Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table

"Beartooth blew me away. Wink writes with an elegant precision that makes the weight of sadness on the heart as palpable as the weight of a past-due notice in his character's hands. What begins as propulsively as a finely drawn thriller ultimately resolves itself into something much more profound than that, at times in contact with the ineffable itself. I read it in a single sitting, but I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time to come."--Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

"Beartooth sank its teeth into me. I had a hard time closing the covers, getting out of my chair, because I was truly utterly transported to the logging roads and snow-melt rivers of Montana. Callan Wink treats nature as a holy altar and a widening mouth, and he writes a story that moves as fast as a bullet down a barrel. His characters and their troubles--especially the two misfit brothers at the heart of this novel--will live with me for a long time."--Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon and The Comet Cycle

"Callan Wink's Beartooth evokes the breathtaking beauty of Yellowstone in its tense exploration of the complicated love and survival of two brothers."--Shelf Awareness

"Wink, who is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River when he's not writing beautifully told short stories and novels, is a master craftsman: his dialogue is pitch perfect, his characters breathtakingly real, and the setting so vividly described that we can feel the mud seeping into our socks and hear the water from the hole in the ceiling plinking into the metal bowl on the floor. A remarkable, memorable novel."--Booklist

"A narrative filled with tension and suspense . . . Through his eloquent yet gritty prose, Wink captures the stark beauty of Montana's landscape and the raw, unfiltered emotions of his characters. . . . Beartooth is not a story of survival in the traditional sense but an exploration of what it means to truly live, to forgive and to find strength in the most unlikely of places. . . . A gripping tale of survival and redemption."--Rocky Mountain Reader

About the Author

Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men's Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River.