The Ploughmen: A Novel

The Ploughmen: A Novel

<p><b>An <i>NPR</i> Best Book of 2014</b><br /><b>A Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection</b></p><p><b>A "bleak and brilliant" (<i>Minneapolis Star Tribune</i>) debut novel ,"one of the finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory, a book that stands alongside Richard Ford's <i>Rock Springs</i>, Marilynne Robinson's <i>Housekeeping</i>, James Welch's <i>Fools Crow</i>." (William Kittredge)</b></p><p>Steeped in a lonesome Montana landscape as unyielding and raw as it is beautiful, Kim Zupan's <i>The Ploughmen</i> is a new classic in the literature of the American West.<br />At the center of this searing, fever dream of a novel are two men—a killer awaiting trial, and a troubled young deputy—sitting across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County sheriff's department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest. With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own. Their uneasy friendship takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence that yokes together two haunted souls by the secrets they share, and by the rugged country that keeps them.</p>