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“Kim Zupan has captured the feel of Montana: he has made a fine beginning.”
— Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove
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“A terrific debut novel that evokes its western landscape with gorgeous prose, The Ploughmen is a powerful and at times painful story.”
— Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author
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“Mr. Zupan produces pleasurably lush and baroque prose, especially when
describing his setting’s awesome and unforgiving topography.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“Set in northern Montana, the novel presents a powerful and implacable landscape, all dry soil and fractured river breaks…The book features plenty of suspense. What it offers in addition are
Zupan’s considerable skills with description and mood…A dark and
imaginative debut.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“Passionately arresting…Even though Zupan’s novel deals with grim topics,
he plows the depths of grief and numbness with such a concentrated dedication
that the prose is a character in itself. His sentences are unleashed in a
furious splendor…Bleak and brilliant—the best kind of book.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
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“Stunning…A remarkable novel…It’s a portrait of the West as a
sometimes desolate and cold place, full of possibility, maybe, but also full of
danger from every corner. It’s a modern West, caught between the romance of the
frontier and the mundane, harsh realities of living in the present day United
States. And it’s absolutely beautiful, from its tragic opening scene to its
tough, necessary end. Zupan is an unsparing writer but also a generous, deeply
compassionate one.”
— NPR
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“The expansive, indifferent, and lonely landscapes that populate the book are as vital as the two main characters and elevate Mr. Zupan’s work from a story about an unlikely friendship to a solemn exploration of the human soul—and how it is formed by the space that surrounds it.”
— Pittsburg Post-Gazette
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“A startlingly beautiful debut novel from a talented
craftsman…Spare and emotionally devastating, this cannot be recommended highly
enough.”
— Library Journal
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“Nuanced…fascinating…What Zupan offers is a
superb, retro prose style, channeling William Faulkner in long passages
engorged with vocabulary, and meditations on what it means to be alive, if
barely, in rural Montana circa 1980…A rich, morose meditation on death, law
enforcement, and friendship.”
— Booklist
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“A stunning work from the first pages to the last.”
— Claire Davis, author of Winter Range
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“Kim Zupan’s The
Ploughmen is one of the finest evocations of life in Western America in recent
memory, a book that stands alongside Richard Ford’s Rock Springs, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, James Welch’s Fools
Crow…Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy at his best.”
— William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky
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“Simply splendid; lyrical, surprising, authoritative, and
starkly honest in its rendering of the human soul.”
— Mark Spragg, author of An Unfinished Life
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“As good a book as I’ve read in years. Luminous…nothing
short of brilliant…a first novel that leaves me impatient for the next.”
— Rick DeMarinis, author of The Year of the Zinc Penny