Set in the fictional town of Port Bonita, on Washington
State’s rugged Pacific coast, West of Here is propelled by a
story that both re-creates and celebrates the American
experience—it is storytelling on the grandest scale. With
one segment of the narrative focused on the town’s founders
circa 1890 and another showing the lives of their
descendants in 2006, the novel develops as a kind of
conversation between two epochs, one rushing blindly toward
the future and the other struggling to undo the damage of
the past.
An exposition on the effects of time, on how something said
or done in one generation keeps echoing through all the
years that follow, and how mistakes keep happening and
people keep on trying to be strong and brave and, most
important, just and right, West of Here harks back to the
work of such masters of Americana as Bret Harte, Edna
Ferber, and Larry McMurtry, writers whose fiction turned
history into myth and myth into a nation’s shared
experience. It is a bold novel by a writer destined to
become a major force in American literature.
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