The Fruit of Stone - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Mark Spragg (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Mark Spragg's first novel is the story of the lifelong friendship between two Wyoming ranchers, McEban and Bennett, and their love for the same woman--Gretchen Simpson, Bennett's wife. When she leaves them both for a new life, the two men follow her on a journey across the American West, testing the limits of their friendship and love.

Review Quotes

"Spragg evokes these doomed characters and the land they inhabit with an achingly beautiful lyricism. Like Annie Proulx and Gretl Erhlich, he's a writer who makes Wyoming's high country so familiar it feels like the reader's own native ground." --Chicago Tribune

"Unforgettable. . . . A long love song to Wyoming and the tough, do-it-right-or-don't-do-it-at-all people who live there." --Denver Post

"A unique, movingly detailed road map of the human soul." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Full of smart troubled people, natural speech, wonderful, lyrical prose, and the great wide varied landscape of Wyoming, where good men and deep women play out their love-burdened lives. . . . Mark Spragg owns one of the truest and most natural voices in American letters." --Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong

"[A] pickup truck odyssey . . . lyrical one moment, gritty the next." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"What at first seems to be a standard love story is soon revealed to be something much more epic--two hardened men, battling each other and their own demons in the bleak, unforgiving landscape of the West. [A] tale of obsession, desire and rage." --The Washington Post

"A refreshing stew of grit and intelligence, longing and loyalty. . . . Places Spragg firmly in the company of such Western writers as Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner." --Rocky Mountain News

About the Author

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and the novels An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004, and Bone Fire. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives with his wife, Virginia, in Wyoming.