This wonderful novella is utterly immersive, taking the reader deep into nature. It’s about Cy Bellman, a 25-year-old widower from Pennsylvania who in 1818 leaves his ten-year-old daughter in the care of his sister in order to travel west into the American wilderness to search for the mysterious bones of a giant animal which he’s read about in the newspaper. With some trinkets and clothes, he buys the help of a Shawnee boy, with the fabulous name of, Old Woman from a Distance. What’s interesting is that it’s nature that Cy Bellman is searching for and yet though he travels through a landscape he’s never seen before he never really stops to examine it. He’s never met a Shawnee before but he doesn’t think about this. He draws pictures of small animals he doesn’t recognise and puts them in letters that he sends back to his daughter but he doesn’t marvel that these creatures are new to him. The nature in West is, as Tennyson said, red in tooth and claw; it’s Cy’s antagonist – the thing that might stop him from finding the animal bones. I’m not going to tell you whether he does find them and get back home to his daughter and sister, or not, but along the way he has to overcome snow, drought, rain, rivers and forests; each obstacle worse than the last, mostly because overcoming them takes more out of Cy each time, both physically and mentally, until even his clothes are worn thin. Who will win – Cy Bellman or nature? You’ll have to read it to find out.
An exquisite page-turner from the winner of the 2015 Frank O'Connor Award is a tightly knit, compulsively readable tale...with all the heft of a sprawling western classic (Booklist, starred review). When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return within two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister, Julie, and heads west. With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother's gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father's route on maps at the subscription library in town and waiting for his letters to arriv
