The Fruit of Stone - Hardcover

Spragg, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573222232 ISBN 13: 9781573222235

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2002

Synopsis

The author of Where Rivers Change Directions pens a beautiful, lyrical novel about two lifelong friends who love the same woman and the journey that will take them through the heart of the West, and into the heart of their relationship. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Mark Spragg, author of the widely praised memoir Where Rivers Change Direction, sets off his first novel, The Fruit of Stone, with a cacophony of twittering birds. Starlings, sparrows, and magpies punctuate Barnum McEban's glorious morning-after with his best friend's wife, Gretchen. When Gretchen leaves town and her marriage behind, McEban and his bereft friend Bennett follow her letters from post-office boxes in Wyoming to Montana and back. Cutting through the road-trip action and Bennett's tenuous control over his temper and his rifle is the story of McEban's own family. His emotionally closed father, his migraine-riddled mother, the brusque but paternal ranch foreman Ansel, and his grandmother form a parallel tale of life on the ranch: hard work, hard living, and hard times. Spragg spins a good Western yarn and infuses every natural landscape with poetic intention, but the writing drags in these transcendent descriptions. The story reads at its most authentic in the terse dialogue between the two hardened friends; their inability to speak poetically to each other brings out more emotion than a flock of pretty birds. --Emily Russin

About the Author:

Mark Spragg is the author of the memoir Where Rivers Change Direction, winner of the 2000 Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1573222232
• ISBN 13: 9781573222235
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304