Northward Dreams - by Craig Lancaster (Hardcover)

About the Book

From acclaimed author Craig Lancaster, a two-time High Plains Book Award winner, comes a story of family violence, dysfunction, and, perhaps, redemption, told across four timelines.

Book Synopsis

From acclaimed author Craig Lancaster, a two-time High Plains Book Award winner, comes a story of family violence, dysfunction, and, perhaps, redemption, told across four timelines.

More than a decade into the 21st century, Nate Ray is down and in the final throes before he's out for good. He has burned through jobs and the goodwill of others, including his son, Brandon. When Nate's dad, Ronnie, summons him for a trip from Texas to Montana to bury Ronnie's sister, Nate's self-destruction is put on hold but new and long-simmering issues arise.

Forty years earlier, in Wyoming, Electra Ray plots an escape to an uncertain future, for herself and her five-year-old son. A new friend awaits on the other end, three states away, but first Electra must break cleanly away from the bonds of a neglectful present.

In 2002, recent high school graduate Cherie Bowden is helping her mother settle her grandma's estate in Billings, Montana, and is already deferring her own dreams. She discovers information that makes her question everything she thinks she knows about the people she comes from.

And in early 1950s Montana, Ronnie Ray-sixteen years old, estranged from the father he barely knows, and on the run from an abusive home life-reaches faithfully toward a connection.

In his latest novel, Lancaster, who has been hailed as "one of Montana's most important writers," goes deep into how history shapes and confines us and how hope sometimes stubbornly abides.

Review Quotes

"Sheer reading pleasure; at turns funny, heartbreaking, suspenseful, and cathartic."-Jonathan Evison, bestselling author of Again and Again and Lawn Boy

"With Northward Dreams, Lancaster taps his rich Texas roots of poverty, displacement, and tangled family troubles in the story of a man who road trips to Montana with nothing left to lose. ... Lancaster's exquisite attention to his characters' bad choices makes readers feel seen, chronicled by a tender biographer-even a little redeemed."-Carrie La Seur, award-winning author of The Home Place and The Weight of an Infinite Sky

"Craig Lancaster gives us the eternal mystery of family and the tangled webs across generations, with a cast of disparate yet wholly realized characters whose various struggles, questions, fault lines and quiet triumphs quickly become our own. Poignant, big-hearted, and as always, beautifully rendered."-Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses and Cloudmaker

"Lancaster deftly probes the complexity of his characters' lives through four generations, his eye and ear keenly tuned to the fabric of contemporary western life."-Caroline Patterson, author of The Stone Sister, High Plains Book Award winner for women's fiction and Montana Library Association honor book

"There is something true and honest on every single page of this right hook of a novel. Craig Lancaster's Northward Dreams follows the entwined lives of people who've never known anything but hard times and who've never known the word quit."-Giano Cromley, author of The Prince of Infinite Space and The Last Good Halloween

"'Wyoming is a lonesome poem whispering through the past.' Northward Dreams combines superb storytelling and stellar writing-another winning novel from Craig Lancaster. Read this book!"-Cheryl Unruh, author of Gravedigger's Daughter: Vignettes from a Small Kansas Town