The Last Crossing - by Guy Vanderhaeghe (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Journey from Victorian England to the whiskey trading posts of the Old West in this epic award-winning bestseller from the author of The Englishman's Boy.

In the late nineteenth century, Englishmen Charles and Addington Gaunt are sent by their father to find their brother Simon, a missionary who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. In the outreaches of the Montana frontier, the brothers hire a guide--a half Blackfoot, half Scot named Jerry Potts--to lead them further north into the area where Simon was last seen. As the party heads out, it grows to include a journalist, a saloonkeeper, a Civil War veteran in search of love, and a young woman bent on revenge.

There's no telling what awaits them . . .

"One of North America's best writers . . . A feast of a book." --Annie Proulx, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Stuffed with enough goodies to keep us entertained for days." --The New York Times Book Review

"Quest and revenge, love and loss converge before the novel's satisfying final twist." --The Boston Globe

"The quality of its plotting, vivid characterizations and descriptions and dark humor place it firmly in the company of the likes of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Review Quotes

"Rarely are today's hungry readers invited to such a feast of a book. There are few writers who can encapsulate a character in a single sentence, turn a phrase or manipulate a metaphor as brilliantly as Vanderhaeghe. One of North America's best writers." -Annie Proulx, Toronto Globe and Mail

"Vanderhaeghe is a prodigiously gifted writer who makes the West, its fierce weathers, rugged landscapes and contrary characters come to life in a way comparable to McMurtry at his best. . . . No reader once embarked on this hugely involving adventure will be able to stop until it is done." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Sumptuously imagined and fashioned with a master craftsman's attentiveness and finesse. . . . There's an almost Platonic articulation of divisions and mirrorings thus working among Vanderhaeghe's gallery of opportunists and misfits-who are nevertheless brought unforgettably to life by this consistently surprising narrative's deft re-creation of its remote milieu. . . . The search for a missing brother adds a mythic dimension to Vanderhaeghe's complex plot. . . . Brilliant work." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Vanderhaeghe moves deftly between present and past, between exterior and interior landscapes, choosing unique and telling details. Especially excellent are the first person passages in which richly individual voices give the story the pulse of life." -Keir Graff, Booklist (starred review)

"[Vanderhaeghe is] a Dickensian sensationalist. His flair for the lurid can be exquisite. . . . Epic novels can be loose, baggy monsters, but this one is stuffed with enough goodies to keep us entertained for days." -John Vernon, The New York Times Book Review

"The Last Crossing is a terrific novel, big, complex, gripping. . . . [His] characters. . . are palpably alive and present to the reader. Its plot-and there is an intricate and thoroughly satisfying one-is deft and put together seamlessly. . . . No clich's lurk in his easy-flowing prose, which catches the look and feel of the North American West with arresting precision and displays it freshly, as if no one had described it before. . . . It is not too much to call Vanderhaeghe's vast canvas magnificent." -Anthony Day, The Los Angeles Times

"The Last Crossing is assured and impassioned, brutal and tender, a convincing re-creation of its milieu, a sharp portrait of its characters. . . . As a novelist, Guy Vanderhaeghe does justice to it all: distance, close-ups, and all the shading in between. . . . As always, Vanderhaeghe's muscular prose is a pleasure to read." -Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post Book World

"In a panorama of late-nineteenth-century Montana and western Canada, Vanderhaeghe details the lawlessness of the early frontier towns and the desperate ferocity of the dying indigenous tribes. . . . As the various searches for revenge or redemption get under way the writing achieves unforced grace and power." -The New Yorker

"Outstanding . . . Whether merging voices, bridging cultures, exposing human weaknesses, commenting intelligently about history and its implications, dazzling with description, or flat-out spinning a riveting yarn, Vanderhaeghe owns all-around skills that are increasingly rare . . . Luckily for us, Vanderhaeghe gives countless fantastic experiences in one powerful, beautiful, and heartbreaking novel." -Mark Luce, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Doing justice to Guy Vanderhaeghe's ambitious, brilliant The Last Crossing is difficult. It is a wonderful novel, an ambitious upgrading of history and mythology. Packed with personality and color and beautifully written, it's about the formation of modern North American society, frontier-style. A Western with cosmic overtones, it covers a remarkable amount of territory, as much geographical as psychological. . . . How much the reader comes to care for these characters attest to Vanderhaeghe's vision and power. In a way, The Last Crossing is about rites of passage: from father to son, mother to daughter, culture to culture." -Carlo Wolff, The Chicago Sun Times

"If there's any literary justice, any thirst for adventure, any love for a great Western, then The Last Crossing won't just cross the Canadian border, but shatter it. . . . On the spokes of this fantastic novel spin cowboys and Indians, gunfights and Civil War battles, romance and broken hearts, murder and revenge. . . . Vanderhaeghe's genius is melding all these elements into an irresistible story." -Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

"Finely crafted. . . . This tale of crossings of oceans, national borders, amorous boundaries, lines of violence, the white/red divide, generations, even sexual identity bears some resemblance to the work of other serious novelists who sometimes lean toward adventure writing about the West, notably Cormac McCarthy and Jim Harrison." -Art Winslow, The Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Guy Vanderhaeghe is the author of six books of fiction including The Englishman's Boy (1996), which was a longtime national bestseller in Canada and won the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and for Best Book of the Year, and was short-listed for The Giller Prize, and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Vanderhaeghe is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College in Saskatchewan, Canada.