The Rest Of The Earth (A Novel)

The Story

William Haywood Henderson's first novel, Native, received lavish praise for its evocative prose and breathtaking descriptions of the stark Western landscape. Now, Henderson returns to the Wind River Valley in Wyoming to tell the story of one man's odyssey into this forbidding land.In the years following the Civil War, Walker Avary sails from Boston to San Francisco, then heads into the remote West, following the sketchy maps of the few who have gone before him. As he travels, he experiences several fleeting relationships before settling in a remote valley with a native young woman whose tribe was destroyed through its previous encounters with white men. Together through the deep winter, the texture of their lives is recounted in prose so sensuous that the sights, scents, even the wildlife and natural elements they encounter are made startling vivid.Both a precisely rendered depiction of time and place and a nearly mythic tale of survival in the wilderness, The Rest of the Earth examines the intersection of individual destiny, the legacy of personal history and the powerful forces of nature, which run like deep swift currents through this beautifully written work.-- 'The Rest of the Earth' can be compared to the novels of Cormac McCarthy, Ivan Doig, and Wallace Stegner, with their western locales, lyrical writings, and brooding landscapes.