The Shining Mountains - by Alix Christie

Book Synopsis

The year is 1838. A young Scotsman forced from his homeland arrives at Hudson's Bay. Angus McDonald is contracted to British masters to trade for fur. But the world he discovers is beyond even a Highlander's wildest imaginings: raging rivers, buffalo hunts, and the powerful daughter of an ancient and magnificent people. In Catherine Baptiste, kin to Nez Perce chiefs, Angus recognizes a kindred spirit. The Rocky Mountain West in which they meet will soon be torn apart by competing claims: between British fur traders, American settlers, and the Native peoples who have lived for millennia in the valleys and plateaus of the Shining Mountains' western slopes.

In this epic family saga, the real history of the American West is revealed in all its terror, beauty, and complexity. The Shining Mountains brilliantly limns a world now long forgotten: of blended cultures seeking allies, trading furs for guns and steel, and a way of life in collision with westward colonial expansion.

Review Quotes

"The Shining Mountains takes its history seriously. Love, treachery, violence, and honour, it is all here in a novel to be savoured."--Sarah Dunant, author of In the Name of the Family

"The Shining Mountains is an ambitious rendering of the conflicts between and among Indigenous Nations and European invaders in the final years of British American rivalry below the Medicine Line, centered in the diverse voices of a mixed-heritage family. Christie's book improves and expands on an important chapter of the West."--Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., author of Sacred Smokes and Sacred City

"A heartbreaking and horripilating tale of greed and betrayal. A monument to the hypocrisy of Manifest Destiny."--Dennis McCarthy, author of The Gospel According to Billy the Kid: A Novel

"Alix Christie has not only written a generous and spirited novel of the fur trade and the marriage of two worlds, she has written a rousing adventure tale steeped in research and oral histories. Humorous and deeply tender, I admire The Shining Mountains for its vivid and emotionally rendered characters, its magnificent landscape, and how Christie captures the extraordinary power of living story."--Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea

"An exceptional novel. . . . Intimate and expansive, tender and violent, The Shining Mountains is both a gripping family saga and a profound requiem for the lives lost and displaced by American westward expansion. This is storytelling at its finest."--Zack Bean, author of Man on Fire

About the Author

Alix Christie is the direct descendant of Angus McDonald's brother Duncan. Her debut novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice, was published by Harper Books in 2014. A longtime journalist and book reviewer, she has written for many publications including the Washington Post, the Guardian of London, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Economist. She currently divides her time between San Francisco, California, and Berlin, Germany.