Fencing the Sky

A cattleman flees the scene of an accidental murder in “the most ambitious and original novel about the modern West to have appeared in some time” (Kirkus Reviews).

Stepping his horse through the lush, beaver-worked draw looking for stray cows, Mike Arans never imagined that, moments later, he’d find himself swinging a nylon loop around Merriweather Snipes and pulling until his neck snapped. Once Snipes was dead, Mike fished a notepad and a stub of pencil from his pocket, wrote “I did this,” signed his name, and stuffed the note into Snipes’s breast pocket. Then Mike rode to his house, stocked up on supplies, and rode due west.

Fencing the Sky is the story of how circumstances spiral out of control, the story of gross indifference and avarice in the face of breathtaking beauty. Ultimately, James Galvin’s novel is a book about violence and how it destroys lives when the land is at stake. This long-awaited lyrical first novel is nothing less than the story of the disappearance of the American West.

“A unique and extraordinary book, a mixture of novel and natural history wherein Galvin reinvents the form, the true mark of a genuine artist . . . I can’t recommend it too highly.” —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall