Overview

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.

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9781954118027

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Reviews

""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.""--Minnesota Star ""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 ""A novel of impeccable control and unflinching darkness. And then a glimmer of hope.""--Kirkus (starred review) ""One of the best and fiercest heist stories since A Simple Plan . . . Beartooth is unstoppable, the literary treasure you've been looking for.""--Junot Diaz, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ""Callan Wink's 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 ""Callan Wink's 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 it 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

"Praise for August: ""In this tightly controlled yet highly unpredictable novel we discover what it is like to come of age in a part of America that is always changing, always the same.""--The Guardian ""Told with all the economy, clarity of character, and lively prose that mark [Callan] Wink's short stories, this is writing that would tell just as well around the campfire as it does on the page.""--The Millions ""Like a current Jim Harrison, Wink makes irresistible drama out of an individual's search for identity in landscapes that are by turns romantic and limiting.""--Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""August is an exceptional coming-of-age story. Callan Wink is too wise and empathetic a writer to ever allow his readers easy judgments as we follow his memorable young protagonist on his precarious way through adolescence. An outstanding debut novel and worthy follow-up to Wink's widely praised collection of stories.""--Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of The Risen and Serena ""Callan Wink's characters are as real and vivid as if they'd stepped into your living room, uninvited, to tell their stories. His style is as clear, precise, and starkly poetic as the young Hemingway's, but with a more droll sense of humor. This book is simply super--a deft, beautiful, deeply engaging read.""--Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane ""August is the rural coming-of-age that so many of us experience but so rarely see in print. Callan Wink has a voice like Annie Proulx's; he lands every detail with concrete authenticity and every emotional moment with tangible feeling.""--Rae DelBianco, author of 2019 Prix Litt�raire Lucien-Barri�re winner Rough Animals ""August is alive. I haven't connected with a character so intensely--and sometimes uncomfortably--since I first read Jim Harrison's early novels almost thirty years ago. Wink's prose has Harrison's into-the-vein immediacy and Tom McGuane's perfect pitch, and there's a hard-to-pin-down hint of Cormac McCarthy in there too (so that makes three of my heroes). But the voice and ethos are new to me, and absolutely Wink's.""--James A. McLaughlin, Edgar Award-winning author of Bearskin Praise for Dog Run Moon: ""[An] excellent first book of stories . . . One of the great things about Dog Run Moon is how resilient and funny [the characters] are. They're at the end of their ropes, but they can still howl about the joy and pain each day brings, as if the young Levon Helm were singing their stories. . . . This is Thomas McGuane territory, and also that of writers like Joy Williams and Jim Harrison.""--New York Times ""Wink is definitely not a writer of half measures; each of these stories demonstrates his ability to lay life bare. A significant collection highly deserving of the spotlight.""--Library Journal (starred review) ""Myth and history color these highly satisfying fictions about the way men and women struggle to shape their lives.""--Kirkus (starred review) ""The perils of work and the weight of bequeathal fuel these stories, and each one holds a lasting, unshakable image. Sometimes grace is bestowed upon the characters in a sidewindering, not altogether fabulous fashion; sometimes it's not bestowed at all. Callan Wink seems to know well the stratagems and delusions of men's hearts. He also seems born and bred to short-story mastery.""--Joy Williams, author of The Visiting Privilege ""Callan Wink's debut is impressive indeed. Fine, old-fashioned, rich and juicy fiction. Weeks later I'm still living with the characters.""--Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall ""Callan Wink's fresh, urgent stories have an energy and propulsion that set them well apart from the cerebral finger painting of so much literary fiction. Here is a writer with a great big horizon.""--Thomas McGuane, author of Crow Fair ""Callan Wink's stories remind me of expertly tied trout flies--beautifully crafted, true to reality, and barbed. What a fine young writer.""--Ron Rash, author of Above the Waterfall ""As in all the best collections, each and every story in Dog Run Moon sings in the essential registers of love and death, work and nature. Callan Wink has the wisdom to write only of the things that matter, and the talent to make these stories as fresh as the literary headwaters from which they come.""--Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek"

"Praise for August: ""In this tightly controlled yet highly unpredictable novel we discover what it is like to come of age in a part of America that is always changing, always the same.""--The Guardian ""Told with all the economy, clarity of character, and lively prose that mark [Callan] Wink's short stories, this is writing that would tell just as well around the campfire as it does on the page.""--The Millions ""Like a current Jim Harrison, Wink makes irresistible drama out of an individual's search for identity in landscapes that are by turns romantic and limiting.""--Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""August is an exceptional coming-of-age story. Callan Wink is too wise and empathetic a writer to ever allow his readers easy judgments as we follow his memorable young protagonist on his precarious way through adolescence. An outstanding debut novel and worthy follow-up to Wink's widely praised collection of stories.""--Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of The Risen and Serena ""Callan Wink's characters are as real and vivid as if they'd stepped into your living room, uninvited, to tell their stories. His style is as clear, precise, and starkly poetic as the young Hemingway's, but with a more droll sense of humor. This book is simply super--a deft, beautiful, deeply engaging read.""--Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane ""August is the rural coming-of-age that so many of us experience but so rarely see in print. Callan Wink has a voice like Annie Proulx's; he lands every detail with concrete authenticity and every emotional moment with tangible feeling.""--Rae DelBianco, author of 2019 Prix Littéraire Lucien-Barrière winner Rough Animals ""August is alive. I haven't connected with a character so intensely--and sometimes uncomfortably--since I first read Jim Harrison's early novels almost thirty years ago. Wink's prose has Harrison's into-the-vein immediacy and Tom McGuane's perfect pitch, and there's a hard-to-pin-down hint of Cormac McCarthy in there too (so that makes three of my heroes). But the voice and ethos are new to me, and absolutely Wink's.""--James A. McLaughlin, Edgar Award-winning author of Bearskin Praise for Dog Run Moon: ""[An] excellent first book of stories . . . One of the great things about Dog Run Moon is how resilient and funny [the characters] are. They're at the end of their ropes, but they can still howl about the joy and pain each day brings, as if the young Levon Helm were singing their stories. . . . This is Thomas McGuane territory, and also that of writers like Joy Williams and Jim Harrison.""--The New York Times ""Wink is definitely not a writer of half measures; each of these stories demonstrates his ability to lay life bare. A significant collection highly deserving of the spotlight.""--Library Journal (starred review) ""Myth and history color these highly satisfying fictions about the way men and women struggle to shape their lives.""--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ""The perils of work and the weight of bequeathal fuel these stories, and each one holds a lasting, unshakable image. Sometimes grace is bestowed upon the characters in a sidewindering, not altogether fabulous fashion; sometimes it's not bestowed at all. Callan Wink seems to know well the stratagems and delusions of men's hearts. He also seems born and bred to short-story mastery.""--Joy Williams, author of The Visiting Privilege ""Callan Wink's debut is impressive indeed. Fine, old-fashioned, rich and juicy fiction. Weeks later I'm still living with the characters.""--Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall ""Callan Wink's fresh, urgent stories have an energy and propulsion that set them well apart from the cerebral finger painting of so much literary fiction. Here is a writer with a great big horizon.""--Thomas McGuane, author of Crow Fair ""Callan Wink's stories remind me of expertly tied trout flies--beautifully crafted, true to reality, and barbed. What a fine young writer.""--Ron Rash, author of Above the Waterfall ""As in all the best collections, each and every story in Dog Run Moon sings in the essential registers of love and death, work and nature. Callan Wink has the wisdom to write only of the things that matter, and the talent to make these stories as fresh as the literary headwaters from which they come.""--Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek"

Author Information

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.

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