East of the Mountains

East of the Mountains is a mythic journey story with a twist in that its hero is 73.  I wrote it on the heels of research that took me into the Dolomites and the Appenines in Italy, and the sage steppe and orchards of central Washington State.  My protagonist's journey adheres to actual locations; the book's frontispiece includes a fanciful map in which the mythic elements of the journey are tied to real places--the Frenchman Hills, Stray Horse Canyon, Lynch Coulee, Low Gap Pass.

A buttoned-up, tidied, and published novel is one thing, a writer's memory of the time and tenor of its writing another.  When I think back on the era of East of the Mountains, I'm intensely fond and wistful simultaneously.  In its service I roamed abroad with a notebook, mostly alone, mostly on foot, indulging the romance of the American west, and of the mountains of Italy, with unbridled zeal.

I can't go back again, but when I read East of the Mountains, I'm once again alive in that adventure, and can feel again an inkling of the exhilaration I felt in imagining this tale and in writing it.

Praise

“A compassionate and masterful achievement.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Profound and ambitious. . . . Guterson depicts . . . moral and spiritual struggle with a clear-eyed intensity and intelligence that gives East of the Mountains its essential authority.” Chicago Tribune

“The shape is elegant, the tone is perfectly controlled, almost cool, and Guterson’s prose shines with [a] taut polish. . . .[He] is a craftsman with a sense of literary history, one of the most serious and accomplished young American writers.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Guterson possesses a remarkable gift for capturing people and places, etching them into the reader’s mind.” USA Today

“This book would be a challenge to praise too highly. It resounds with clarity. It feels like home.” The San Diego Union-Tribune