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Synopses & Reviews
Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Ridgerunner is the follow-up to Gil Adamson's award-winning and critically acclaimed novel The Outlander.
November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son's future.
Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family's cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.
Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson's follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.
Review
"In Gil Adamson's Ridgerunner we meet thirteen-year-old Jack Boulton, whose quest — perhaps foolish, certainly dangerous — is to be reunited with his only living family member, his father. A beautiful and moving novel about the durability of family ties, Ridgerunner is a brilliant literary achievement, and in Jack Boulton, Adamson has created one of the most vividly rendered children you will ever encounter in fiction. I loved every page of it." -Michael Redhill, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Bellevue Square
Review
"Gil Adamson understands the pain and the necessary beauty of our connection with other people better than anyone. Ferocious, entirely authentic, funny, and tragic, Ridgerunner is a wild adventure spun in exalted prose: the book I've been wanting to read for years." Marina Endicott, award-winning author of Good to a Fault and The Difference
Review
"Part literary Western, part historical mystery, it's a vivid story that grabs you by the eyeballs on page one." Globe and Mail
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"I have just finished reading Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson, a novel that left me deeply satisfied and savouring the experience of reading a really good book...A great story and a wonderfully written novel." Metro North Bay-Nippissing
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"Ridgerunner is truly magnificent. It hearkens back to when novels were generous and ambitious, big-shouldered and big-hearted. Gil Adamson writes worlds utterly unto their own." Robert Olmstead, award-winning author of Coal Black Horse and Savage Country
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"Adamson writes with a sly wit and a deep insight into her characters and the natural world but, more significantly, into how the characters and the natural world interact, shaping and being shaped by one another....Everything packs a significant punch and draws the reader into the novel's world with a startling immediacy." Quill & Quire
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"Striking....Once again, Adamson's powers as a poet weave her characters deeply into the natural world." Georgia Straight
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"Rich and exciting...delightful, sinewy language that takes time with the details of the moment, of humour and whimsy....Adamson's writing soars." Hamilton Review of Books
About the Author
Gil Adamson is the critically acclaimed author of Ridgerunner, which won the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail and the CBC. Her first novel, The Outlander, won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the ReLit Award, and the Drummer General's Award. It was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, CBC Canada Reads, and the Prix Femina in France; longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as a Globe and Mail and Washington Post Top 100 Book. She is also the author of a collection of linked stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, and two poetry collections, Primitive and Ashland. She lives in Toronto.