Overview

In 1849, a seventeen-year-old Irish immigrant named Declan Shea stands at the Powder River and watches sixty million buffalo come over a rise. By 1883, he rides the same country and cannot find eleven. Between those two moments lies a life. Declan learns his trade on the northern plains-the Sharps rifle, the skinning knife, the arithmetic of a hide taken clean. He takes a Cheyenne name he did not choose: Heávohe. He works beside a ruined man named Bill until the day Bill stops working. He crosses paths with a Crow woman named Ashkáale in a willow draw and keeps crossing paths with her for twenty-five years without ever finding the four words that might have mattered. Told in the spare, unsparing prose of American literary realism, Empty Ground is the story of a man who understood exactly what he was doing on a continent that had decided to let him do it-and of the people who watched it happen from the ground they were losing. For readers of Paulette Jiles, James Welch, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Kent Haruf.

Full Product Details

9798995804727

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

William Mann is the author of The Long Reckoning, a literary historical fiction series set in the American West between 1840 and 1890. Book One, The Rancher, introduced the Blackfeet of the northern plains and the Starvation Winter of 1883-84. Empty Ground, Book Two, follows the Irish immigrant Declan Shea across thirty-five years of the buffalo hunt and the destruction of the great herds.William and his wife Chris live and travel full-time in an RV with their dogs, Sadie and Bronn. Each novel in the series is researched on the ground-the ridges, rivers, reservations, and trading posts where the historical events actually occurred.The Long Way Home, Book Three, is forthcoming. Book Four is underway.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available