Crossing Purgatory

After a family tragedy, Thompson Grey, whose fate was to live, abandons his home in Indiana on a westward sojourn haunted by grief and regret. Captain Upperdine, a guide for settlers, disrupts Thompson's solitude with an invitation to join his wagon company on the Santa Fe trail. The offer provides purpose and, ultimately, a destination where Thompson's emotional recovery can begin. Narrator William Dufris embraces the Western genre, delivering exposition in a gravelly tone marked by punctuated syllables and drawn-out vowels. With few exceptions, each character--both real and imagined--is immediately recognizable as Dufris blends voice and cadence to shape personality. The deep bass of Captain Upperdine commands attention, while the raspy moans from the ghosts of Thompson's mind unnerve. A.S. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

March 25, 2013
This striking tale, a literary western from Schanbacher (Migration Patterns), chronicles one momentous year in the life of a plainsman on the eve of the American Civil War. The young farmer, Thompson Grey, is stricken with grief and guilt after his wife, Rachel, and two sons, Matthew and Daniel, die from diphtheria while he’s away asking his wealthy planter father, Reverend Matthew Grey, for an advance on his inheritance. Leaving his Indiana homestead in the hopes that “he might outpace his grief,” he joins up in Kansas with Captain John Upperdine, who’s guiding a wagon train that includes the pregnant Hanna Light and her son, Joseph, whom Thompson befriends. He and the Lights elect to accept Upperdine’s invitation to stay a while at his Kansas ranch, also farmed by the colorful Benito Ibarra—a relation of Upperdine’s wife, Genoveva. The ranchers survive a ravenous plague of grasshoppers, Hanna gives birth to a daughter she names Destiny, and Thompson experiments with growing a new variety of wheat. They gut it through the harsh winter before Thompson finally comes to terms with his loss at the climax of Schanbacher’s visceral and triumphant saga of the Old West. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, the Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.