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Ridgerunner

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Winner

Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist

Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Writers' Trust Fiction Prize winner Ridgerunner is now available as a paperback.

November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son's future.

Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family's cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.

Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson's follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.

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    • Booklist

      Starred review from February 1, 2021
      At the center of this engrossing literary historical novel with a touch of mystery is a boy, Jack Boulton, and the lengths adults will go to assure his future. William, his father, is a skilled woodsman and the Ridgerunner, an infamous robber accomplished in the use of dynamite. Nearing 50, he lives in a remote cabin somewhere outside Banff with the civilization-wary Mary Boulton, his much younger wife, whom he adores, and Jack, their beloved 12-year-old son. It's 1917, and WWI has inflamed the world, with small tendrils reaching all the way to the Canadian wilderness. Their idyllic life is upended when Mary and Jack fall ill, and Mary dies. Sister Beatrice, aka Emilia Cload, a family friend in Banff who is on self-declared leave of absence from the convent, takes Jack in. William lights out on a crime spree, driven to build a nest egg to give Jack a better life. But Emilia has her own plans for Jack. Adamson (The Outlander, 2008) immerses readers in life as it was a century ago with attention to details about horses, wolves, bears, the weather, and all of nature, including the light and dark of human nature. Her sly plotting never quits, luring the reader into shocking surprises.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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