Synopses & Reviews
At the foot of the Elwha River, the muddy outpost of Port Bonita is about to boom, fueled by a ragtag band of dizzyingly disparate men and women unified only in their visions of a more prosperous future. A failed accountant by the name of Ethan Thornburgh has just arrived in Port Bonita to reclaim the woman he loves and start a family. Ethan's obsession with a brighter future impels the damming of the mighty Elwha to harness its power and put Port Bonita on the map.
More than a century later, his great-great grandson, a middle manager at a failing fish-packing plant, is destined to oversee the undoing of that vision, as the great Thornburgh dam is marked for demolition, having blocked the very lifeline that could have sustained the town. West of Here is a grand and playful odyssey, a multilayered saga of destiny and greed, adventure and passion, that chronicles the life of one small town, turning America's history into myth, and myth into a nation's shared experience.
Review
"An enjoyable, meaty read a vision of a place told through the people who find themselves at the edge of America's idea of itself." Los Angeles Times
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"[A] booming, bighearted epic." Vanity Fair
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"Riotously funny....Wonderfully charming." The New York Times Book Review
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"[A] big, booming ruckus of a novel....Evison [is] a tremendously gifted storyteller." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Evison gives us a jaunty, rain-slicked quest story....Its ending is clever and satisfying, and its arrival could signal the breakout of a promising career." Cleveland Plain Dealer
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"Jonathan Evison, author of the 2009 Washington State Book Award-winning All About Lulu, returns with West of Here, a fantastic 482-page doorstop of a novel chronicling the clashing cultures of a peripatetic group of immigrant settlers and Klallam Indians in the fictional town of Port Bonita, in the Olympic Peninsula. Bearing the hallmarks of an epic yarn, the novel boasts frontier exploits, Native American mysticism, Bigfoot, and an environmental cause wound into its myriad character stories." Robert M. Detman, Rain Taxi (Read the entire Rain Taxi review)
About the Author
Jonathan Evison is the author of All About Lulu, which won the Washington State Book Award. In 2009, he was the recipient of a Richard Buckley Fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He lives on an island in Western Washington.