Novels
- The Fruit of Stone (2002)
- An Unfinished Life (2004)
- Bone Fire (2010)
Non fiction
- Where Rivers Change Direction (1999)
Novels Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Mark Spragg Books Overview
The Fruit of Stone
Mark Spragg’s fiction debut is the story of the lifelong friendship between two men and their love for the woman who eludes them. Though Gretchen is married to his best friend, McEban has been in love with her since they were children growing up on adjacent ranches in Wyoming. When she leaves her husband for a new life, the two men follow her on an odyssey across the American West that forces truths and tests the ultimate, mystical extremes of love and loyalty. Muscular, vivid, wise, tender, funny, and true: Mark Spragg’s much anticipated first novel is entirely unforgettable.
An Unfinished Life
One of the truest and most original new voices in American letters, as Kent Haruf has written, Mark Spragg now tells the story of a complex, prodigal homecoming. Jean Gilkyson is floundering in a trailer house in Iowa with yet another brutal boyfriend when she realizes this kind of life has got to stop, especially for the sake of her daughter, Griff. But the only place they can run to is Ishawooa, Wyoming, where Jean’s loved ones are dead and her father in law, the only person who could take them in, wishes that she was too. For a decade, Einar Gilkyson has blamed her for the accident that took his son s life, and he has chosen to go on living himself largely because his oldest friend couldn t otherwise survive. They ve been bound together like brothers since the Korean War and now face old age on a faltering ranch, their intimacy even more acute after Mitch was horribly crippled while Einar helplessly watched. Of course, ten year old Griff knows none of this only that her father is dead and her mother has bad taste in men. But once she encounters this grandfather she d never heard about, and the black cowboy confined to the bunkhouse, with irrepressible courage and great spunk she attempts to turn grievous loss, wrath, and recrimination to which she s naturally the most vulnerable toward reconciliation and love. Immediately compelling and constantly surprising, rich in character, landscape, and compassion, An Unfinished Life shows a novelist of extraordinary talents in the fullness of his powers.
Bone Fire
Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic nowadays. The sheriff, Crane Carlson, needs no reminder of this but gets one anyway when he finds a kid not yet twenty murdered in a meth lab. His other troubles include a wife who’s going off the rails with bourbon and pot, and his own symptoms of the disease that killed his grandfather. Einar Gilkyson, taking stock at eighty, counts among his dead a lifelong friend, a wife and far too young their only child; and his long absent sister has lately returned home from Chicago after watching her soul mate die. His granddaughter, Griff, has dropped out of college to look after him, though Einar would rather she continue with her studies and her boyfriend, Paul. Completing this extended family are Barnum McEban and his ward, Kenneth, a ten year old whose mother Paul s sister is off marketing spiritual enlightenment. What these characters have to contend with on a daily basis is bracing enough, involving car accidents, runaway children, strokes and Lou Gehrig s disease, not to mention the motorcycle rallies and rodeos that flood the tiny local jail. But as their lives become even more strained, hardship foments exceptional compassion and generosity, and those caught in their own sorrow alleviate the same in others, changing themselves as they do so. In this gripping story, along with harsh truths and difficult consolation come moments of hilarity and surprise and beauty. No one writes more compellingly about the modern West than Mark Spragg, and in Bone Fire he is at the very height of his powers.
Where Rivers Change Direction
‘I knew the horses as I knew my family…
When I was separated from them I felt wrong in the world. When I was separated from them I took no comfort in the sound of the creek. I felt chilled without the heat of them. In the short lulls between rides I leaned against the corrals, watching them roil like some captured pod of smallish whales, multi colored, snorting at their handicapped buoyancy. When I stepped in among them, they would turn to me, roll their eyes until the whites showed, flick their ears. They were used to the sight and sound of me. I was the boy who straddled their hearts.’ If the West had a voice this is how it would sound. Passionate. Unequivocal. In the tradition of Ivan Doig’s THIS HOUSE OF SKY, Mark Spragg’s stunning collection, Where Rivers Change Direction, renders an unforgettable story of an adolescence spent on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming a remote spread on the Shoshone National Forest, the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the lower forty eight states. In this sublime and unforgiving landscape, Spragg’s distant and mercurial father, his emotionally isolated but resilient mother, his fierce and devoted younger brother Rick, and his mentor, a wry and wise cowboy named John, cleave to one another and to the harsh life they have chosen. Unrelenting winds, pitiless blizzards, muscular rivers from these elements Spragg divines the universal yearnings for self reliance, trust, acceptance, and love. Where Rivers Change Direction illuminates the unexpected wisdom and irrevocable truth embedded in the small, but profound dramas of one boy’s journey toward manhood.
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