Books › Lonesome Dove
Lonesome Dove
First published 1985 · 960 pages
An expansive, dust-choked elegy for the American West that will break your heart and leave you missing its characters like old friends.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting around a campfire with old friends, listening to a story that is equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. It is a sprawling, sun-baked epic that takes its time, letting you settle into the rhythms of the trail and the deeply lived-in minds of its characters. The prose is unpretentious and earthy, driven by crackling, wry dialogue that masks a profound undercurrent of melancholy. As the journey presses northward, the initial warmth and humor slowly give way to a stark, unsentimental reckoning with mortality, the harshness of the frontier, and the heavy cost of dreams. It is a monumental, immersive experience for readers who love sweeping, character-driven sagas where the emotional landscape is just as vast and unforgiving as the physical one.
- Mood
- sun-baked
- expansive
- melancholic
- rugged
- Tone
- wry
- elegiac
- unsentimental
- earthy
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the death of the frontier · enduring friendship · myth versus reality · the burden of leadership · mortality and aging
- The writing
- Unpretentious, deeply conversational, and deceptively simple, with a dry wit that masks profound emotional depths.
- The arc
- Begins with humorous, dusty camaraderie and slowly descends into profound loss, tragedy, and a bittersweet reckoning with the past.
- Who it's for
- Readers who want to live inside a sprawling, character-driven epic where the people feel as real as the dirt under their boots.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- sexual assault
- animal death
- grief and loss
- racism
About the book
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, the author of Terms of Endearment, is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major noel at last of the American West as it really was.
A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces all the West--legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers--in a novel that recreates the Central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths.
Set in the late nineteenth century. Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a Darin, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream--the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.
Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers, partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven, demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience for weakness, and not many of his own. He is obsessed with the dream of creating his own empire, and with the need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men could hardly be more different, but both are tough, redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each other, if nothing else.
Call's dream not only drags Gus along in its wake, but draws in a vast cast of characters: -Lorena, the whore with the proverbial heart of gold, whom Gus (and almost everyone else) loves, and who. Survives one of the most terrifying experiences any woman could have... -Elmira, the restless, reluctant wife of a small-time Arkansas sheriff, who runs away from the security of marriage to become part of the great Western adventure... --Blue Duck, the sinister Indian renegade, one of the most frightening villains in American fiction, whose steely capacity for cruelty affects the lives of everyone in the book... -Newt, the young cowboy for whom the long and dangerous journey from Texas to Montana is in fact a search for his own identity... -Jake, the dashing, womanising ex-ranger, a comrade-in-arms of Gus and Call, whose weakness leads him to an unexpected fate... -July Johnson, husband of Elmira, whose love for her draws him out of his secure life into a kind of hero...
Description from Open Library.
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