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2020 HWA Gold Crown Award (shortlist)
Shortlisted for the Historical Writers' Association Gold Crown
A gritty and lyrical American epic about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and heads West.
In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family's homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbours, she cuts her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her gun-slinging fugitive brother Noah and bring him home.
A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess's quest lands her in the employ of the territory's violent, capricious governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah - dead or alive. Wrestling with her brother's outlaw identity, and haunted by questions of her own, Jess must outmanoeuvre those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right.
Told in Jess's wholly original and unforgettable voice, the story brims with page-turning Western action, but its approach is modern and nuanced, touching on powerful issues from gender and sexuality to family and identity.
In the sweeping storytelling tradition of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Whiskey When We're Dry transcends the straight-and-narrow Western to land among the classics.
Genre: Historical
A gritty and lyrical American epic about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and heads West.
In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family's homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbours, she cuts her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her gun-slinging fugitive brother Noah and bring him home.
A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess's quest lands her in the employ of the territory's violent, capricious governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah - dead or alive. Wrestling with her brother's outlaw identity, and haunted by questions of her own, Jess must outmanoeuvre those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right.
Told in Jess's wholly original and unforgettable voice, the story brims with page-turning Western action, but its approach is modern and nuanced, touching on powerful issues from gender and sexuality to family and identity.
In the sweeping storytelling tradition of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, Whiskey When We're Dry transcends the straight-and-narrow Western to land among the classics.
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"An orphan girl straight out of a Gillian Welch song, betrayed in every way imaginable by the brutality that 'won the West,' is left no way to hew a family or honor but to become a virtuoso cross-dressed killer of Manifest Destiny's men. As Jessilyn Harney takes on the great lies and liars with lyrical violence, her voice takes flight, becoming a sustained, forlornly beautiful, mind-bending aria for our age." - David James Duncan
"Whiskey When We're Dry is the story of a surprising heroine. In her search for home and family, orphaned Jessilyn Harney rides out on a lonely quest, and invents herself anew. Narrated in a voice cobbled out of slang and sagebrush, Larison's novel is a vivid and fast-paced frontier saga." - Kate Manning
"Whiskey When We're Dry is the story of a surprising heroine. In her search for home and family, orphaned Jessilyn Harney rides out on a lonely quest, and invents herself anew. Narrated in a voice cobbled out of slang and sagebrush, Larison's novel is a vivid and fast-paced frontier saga." - Kate Manning
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Used availability for John Larison's Whiskey When We're Dry