A sweeping four-part epic of the American West that could only come
from the boundless skill and imagination of Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Larry McMurtry.
Over a career that spans fifty years, Larry McMurtry has been celebrated
as "one of America's great storytellers" (The Wall Street Journal) and
a writer who "stands among our best not only because of his uncanny
ability to compress a cogent narrative arc but also because his eye for
the moving detail is infallible" (Los Angeles Times). In The
Berrybender Narratives, now published in a single volume for the first
time, the author of Lonesome Dove delivers the unforgettable story of
an idiosyncratic pioneer family and a truly unique view of the American
West, reminding us again that his writing "has the power to clutch the
heart and also to exhilarate" (The New Yorker).
In 1830, the Berrybender family--British, aristocratic, and fiercely out
of place--abandons their home in England to embark on a journey through
the American West just as the frontier is beginning to open up.
Accompanied by a large and varied collection of retainers, Lord and Lady
Berrybender intend to travel up the Missouri and settle in Texas, hoping
to broaden the perspectives of their children, including Tasmin, a young
woman of grit, beauty, and cunning. But when Tasmin's fast-developing
relationship with Jim Snow, a frontiersman and ferocious Indian fighter,
begins to dictate the family's course, they move further into the
expansive and hostile wilderness and into the path of Indians, pioneers,
mountain men, and explorers. As Lord Berrybender's health falters, and
the rest of the family goes to pieces around him, Tasmin finds herself
taking command of their collective fate and is finally forced to decide
where her future lies.
Full of real and fascinating characters, famous shoot-outs, adventure,
humor, love, and loss, The Berrybender Narratives is an epic of the
American West during its period of transformation, a landscape that
nobody understands better than Larry McMurtry.
