Awards
Synopses & Reviews
Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, Ward is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions — to rediscover his grandmother, now long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life.
Review:
"Brilliant....Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enhancement of life." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"Masterful....Reading it is an experience to be treasured." The Boston Globe
Review:
"Cause for celebration....A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richenss of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction." The Atlantic Monthly
Review:
"A fine novel, engrossing and mature...for when all is said individual lives are very much like bits of detritus, rolling down from the high places of stress and emotion until they reach that place where the tumpling and falling stops and they find their angle of repose. To chronicle this movement as well as this novel does is high art — and first-rate writing." San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
Synopsis:
Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. Through the prism of one family, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction by Jackson J. Benson
Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
Part I: Grass Valley
Part II: New Almaden
Part III: Santa Cruz
Part IV: Leadville
Part V: Michoacán
Part VI: On the Bough
Part VII: The Canyon
Part VIII: The Mesa
Part IX: The Zodiac Cottage
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