Manyebook

Monument Road

Leonard Self has spent a year unwinding his ranch, paying down debts, and fending off the darkening. Just one thing left: taking his wife's ashes to her favorite overlook, where he plans to step off the cliff with her into a stark and beautiful landscape. But Leonard finds he has company on a route that intertwines old wounds and new insights that make him question whether his life is over after all.

Charlie Quimby's writing career has spanned the arts, business and public policy. Now he writes fiction, blogs at Across the Great Divide and volunteers with the homeless in Minneapolis and western Colorado.

�Charlie Quimby’s Monument Road is a fine novel about the New West but also just plain a fine novel. In Quimby’s elegant prose, the character of Leonard Self emerges as endearing and maddening both, and around him Quimby builds an entire community of full-blown and enigmatic and always-original characters. This is a novel with size and scope and generosity, with an acute understanding of human nature and a deep appreciation for the ways people face change and work out their lives in relation to each other.”

—Kent Meyers, author of Twisted Tree and The Work of Wolves

"In prose that might have been chiseled from the magnificent landscape he describes, Charlie Quimby has written a great big American Novel. Full of pathos and humor and sadness, you won't reach the end of this book without feeling fuller and wiser. What a gift Charlie has given us."

—Peter Geye, author of The Lighthouse Road and Safe from the Sea

"Monument Road is a legitimate modern western, complete with an impressively authentic and aging rancher, heartache, ghosts, low-lifes, a rural landscape undergoing radical transformation, a glut of evangelical churches, and the ancient, powerful cliffs and mesas that surround it all, in southwestern Colorado. The narrative is likewise unpredictable and wild! A pleasure to read."

—Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb

"The landscape and characters of Monument Road ring true. Charlie Quimby has created a story that is hard to forget. His attention to the details of a fading life and life style are spot on and will be a window to any reader's understanding of the central phenomenon of the New West."

—Dan O'Brien, author of Stolen Horses and Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch

"Monument Road is a big-hearted novel chock full of memorable characters, a pleasure to read.

—David Rhodes, author of Jewelweed and Driftless

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 365
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781937226251
  • Genres
  • fiction, westerns, novels, adult, contemporary
  • Release date
  • 2013