The year is 1838. A young Scotsman forced from his homeland arrives at Hudson's Bay. Angus McDonald is contracted to British masters to trade for fur. But the world he discovers is beyond even a Highlander's wildest imaginings: raging rivers, buffalo hunts, and the powerful daughter of an ancient and magnificent people. In Catherine Baptiste, kin to Nez Perce chiefs, Angus recognizes a kindred spirit. The Rocky Mountain West in which they meet will soon be torn apart by competing claims: between British fur traders, American settlers, and the Native peoples who have lived for millennia in the valleys and plateaus of the Shining Mountains' western slopes.
In this epic family saga, the real history of the American West is revealed in all its terror, beauty, and complexity. The Shining Mountains brilliantly limns a world now long forgotten: of blended cultures seeking allies, trading furs for guns and steel, and a way of life in collision with westward colonial expansion.
Genre: Historical
In this epic family saga, the real history of the American West is revealed in all its terror, beauty, and complexity. The Shining Mountains brilliantly limns a world now long forgotten: of blended cultures seeking allies, trading furs for guns and steel, and a way of life in collision with westward colonial expansion.
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"An exceptional novel. . . . Intimate and expansive, tender and violent, The Shining Mountains is both a gripping family saga and a profound requiem for the lives lost and displaced by American westward expansion. This is storytelling at its finest." - Zack Bean
"The Shining Mountains takes its history seriously. Love, treachery, violence, and honour, it is all here in a novel to be savoured." - Sarah Dunant
"Alix Christie has not only written a generous and spirited novel of the fur trade and the marriage of two worlds, she has written a rousing adventure tale steeped in research and oral histories. Humorous and deeply tender, I admire The Shining Mountains for its vivid and emotionally rendered characters, its magnificent landscape, and how Christie captures the extraordinary power of living story." - Debra Magpie Earling
"The Shining Mountains is a rousing historical novel that kept me up late, with woven story lines of fascinating characters moving across the Pacific Northwest seeking fortune and the thrill of survival and, of course, love. I especially loved the women, their bravery and clear-eyed vision of this world, from ancestral legends to the danger of the new." - Susan Straight
"The Shining Mountains takes its history seriously. Love, treachery, violence, and honour, it is all here in a novel to be savoured." - Sarah Dunant
"Alix Christie has not only written a generous and spirited novel of the fur trade and the marriage of two worlds, she has written a rousing adventure tale steeped in research and oral histories. Humorous and deeply tender, I admire The Shining Mountains for its vivid and emotionally rendered characters, its magnificent landscape, and how Christie captures the extraordinary power of living story." - Debra Magpie Earling
"The Shining Mountains is a rousing historical novel that kept me up late, with woven story lines of fascinating characters moving across the Pacific Northwest seeking fortune and the thrill of survival and, of course, love. I especially loved the women, their bravery and clear-eyed vision of this world, from ancestral legends to the danger of the new." - Susan Straight
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