Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best seller The Dog Stars, returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past.
Jim Stegner has seen his share of violence and loss. Years ago he shot a man in a bar. His marriage disintegrated. He grieved the one thing he loved. In the wake of tragedy, Jim, a well-known expressionist painter, abandoned the art scene of Santa Fe to start fresh in the valleys of rural Colorado. Now he spends his days painting and fly-fishing, trying to find a way to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. He works with a lovely model. His paintings fetch excellent prices. But one afternoon, on a dirt road, Jim comes across a man beating a small horse, and a brutal encounter rips his quiet life wide open. Fleeing Colorado, chased by men set on retribution, Jim returns to New Mexico, tormented by his own relentless conscience.
A stunning, savage novel of art and violence, love and grief, The Painter is the story of a man who longs to transcend the shadows in his heart, a man intent on using the losses he has suffered to create a meaningful life.
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“The forty-five-year-old painter Jim Stegner, the title character of Peter
Heller’s second novel, is a Renaissance man of the American West. He
reads T. S. Eliot and listens to Tom Waits…He also has a bad habit,
when his temper flares, of shooting at people and braining them with
rocks…Jim’s life changes decisively when he comes upon a blustery
stranger abusing a small horse. Suspenseful scenes with the local
authorities and vigilantes of various stripes propel the novel. Mr.
Heller’s…close attention to the natural world serves his fiction
well. The Colorado and New Mexico landscapes evoked in The Painter give the novel a deeper than usual sense of place.”
—
New York Times