Donald McCaig Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Butte Polka (1980)
  2. Nop’s Trials (1984)
  3. The Man Who Made the Devil Glad (1986)
  4. The Bamboo Cannon (1988)
  5. Stalking Blind (1988)
  6. Nop’s Hope (1994)
  7. Jacob’s Ladder (1998)
  8. Canaan (2007)
  9. Rhett Butler’s People (2007)
  10. Ruth’s Journey (2014)

Collections

  1. A Useful Dog (2007)

Non fiction

  1. Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men (1991)
  2. An American Homeplace (1992)
  3. The Dog Wars (2007)
  4. Mr. and Mrs. Dog (2013)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Donald McCaig Books Overview

Nop’s Trials

Here is the story of a family and two remarkable individuals Lewis Burkholder, a farmer in Virginia, and his young Border Collie, Nop. When the dog is stolen, Nop embarks on an ordeal of peril and hardship that he survives only through courage and love. The same qualities in Lewis enable him to search relentlessly for his sheep dog a search that takes him far from home and touches forgotten corners of his life.

Nop’s Trials held me in fascinated suspense to the last page. Poignant, authentic and beautiful…
This insight into animal and human nature is masterly.’ James Herriot

Nop’s Hope

The sequel to Nop’s Trials, about a woman and her remarkable border collie.

Jacob’s Ladder

Reminiscent of Cold Mountain and Gone with the Wind, a civil war saga of a Virginia plantation family fulfilling its unforgettable destiny. Widely acclaimed, with comparisons to Margaret Mitchell and Shelby Foote, Jacob’s Ladder is a rich and poignant novel. It is the story of Duncan Gatewood, seventeen and heir to the Gatewood Plantation in Virginia. Duncan falls in love with Maggie, a mulatto slave, who bears him a son, Jacob. Maggie and Jacob are sold south, and Duncan is packed off by his irate father to the Virginia Military Institute. As a cadet, Duncan guards the gallows of John Brown; as a man he will fight for Robert E. Lee and the South. Another Gatewood slave, Jesse whose love for Maggie is unrequited escapes to freedom and enlists in Mr. Lincoln’s army; in time he will confront his former masters.

Permeated with a wealth of scrupulously researched historical detail, McCaig conjures up the interlocked lives of masters and slaves so skillfully that he has gained praise from African American historians and the descendants of confederate veterans. Jacob’s Ladder, lauded by the Virginia Quarterly as ‘the best Civil War novel ever written,’ is an epic tale that resonates with all the bitter glory and deep human shame of America’s greatest war.

Winner of the John Esten Cooke Fiction Award from the Military Order of the Stars and Bars

‘McCaig’s new saga captures the details of wartime Virginia with stunning force…
. Think Cold Mountain; think Gone with the Wind.’ People

Canaan

A bred in the bones storyteller. Geraldine Brooks Canaan fills a vast canvas. Its points of reference are Richmond in the throes of Reconstruction; the trading floors of Wall Street, where men makes fortunes speculating on the war’s consequences; a Virginia plantation, where the ruin of the South is written in wrenching detail; and the Great Plains, where the splendidly arrogant George Custer rides to his fate against Sitting Bull s warriors. This is the story of America over twenty years of its most turbulent history. The characters are black, white, red, ex Union, and ex Confederate; and the principal narrator is a Santee woman, She Goes Before, who marries an ex slave. Through her eyes we witness the hanging of her father by whites in the mass execution of 1863, Red Cloud s banquet with President Grant, and that final confrontation on the bluffs above the Little Bighorn. McCaig s extensive research is revealed in the book s rich historical detail and revisionist perspective. Black life in Reconstruction era Virginia is portrayed particularly well. Library Journal

Rhett Butler’s People

Fully authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, Rhett Butler’s People is the astonishing and long awaited novel that parallels the Great American Novel, Gone With The Wind. Twelve years in the making, the publication of Rhett Butler’s People marks a major and historic cultural event. Through the storytelling mastery of award winning writer Donald McCaig, the life and times of the dashing Rhett Butler unfolds. Through Rhett’s eyes we meet the people who shaped his larger than life personality as it sprang from Margaret Mitchell’s unforgettable pages: Langston Butler, Rhett’s unyielding father; Rosemary his steadfast sister; Tunis Bonneau, Rhett’s best friend and a onetime slave; Belle Watling, the woman for whom Rhett cared long before he met Scarlett O’Hara at Twelve Oaks Plantation, on the fateful eve of the Civil War. Of course there is Scarlett. Katie Scarlett O’Hara, the headstrong, passionate woman whose life is inextricably entwined with Rhett’s: more like him than she cares to admit; more in love with him than she’ll ever know Brought to vivid and authentic life by the hand of a master, Rhett Butler’s People fulfills the dreams of those whose imaginations have been indelibly marked by Gone With The Wind.

A Useful Dog

Alternately comical, melancholic, pragmatic, and poetic, Donald McCaig’s collection AUseful Dog offers a delightful exploration of the simple yet rich relationship between dogs and humans. Having cast aside urban life in the 1970s in favor of working and living on a sheep farm in Virginia, McCaig has spent the past three decades raising working sheepdogs and writing about his experiences with them. A Useful Dog comprises a selection of short pieces vintage McCaig that reveal not only the ins and outs of sheepdog work and trials but also the joy and devotion that dogs bring to our daily lives. For any dog enthusiast, this little book will prove a telling reminder of why the dog became known as man’s best friend.

Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men

The engaging account of the author’s search for a trained border collie in Scotland, to bring back to his farm in Virginia. McCaig delves into the mysterious pact between dog and man, which involves trust and deep communication. Traveling from town to town, to competitions and farms, meeting shepherds and trainers, McCaig introduces us to unforgettable animal and human characters.

An American Homeplace

In the tradition of Wendell Berry and John McPhee, Donald McCaig wites with a powerful sense of place, and of history of Virginia’s Highland County, in An American Homeplace. On the fast track in the New York advertising world, McCaig gave it all up to move to a ramshackle farm in Virginia’s upper Cowpasture River Valley. Enhanced by the author’s evident love for his land and for the stories it has to tell, An American Homeplace is an inviting combination of personal memoir and narrative history.

The Dog Wars

Well known writer Donald McCaig turns his attention in The Dog Wars to the 1990s controversy between the working border collie community and the American Kennel Club. Chronicling a critical turning point in the history of the border collie, The Dog Wars is a must read for anyone interested in the culture of dogs in the United States.

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