This image is the cover for the book Black Angus

Black Angus

An Ozarks rancher takes a desperate gamble in this searing novel from “one of the truly great American writers of the 20th century” (The Guardian).

Bob Blanchard spent his entire inheritance on a cattle ranch in the Missouri Ozarks—but it hasn’t turned out the way he’d hoped, and he’s now being threatened with foreclosure. The cattle are sick, and the herd can’t survive, so Blanchard agrees to a reckless scheme to sell the cattle before their illness is widely known. But when a faked cattle rustling and an insurance scam goes wrong, the plan begins to crumble from the inside out.

“A commanding writer of unusual delicacy and power.” —The New Yorker

“A born storyteller.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Newton Thornburg

Born in Harvey, Illinois, Newton Thornburg graduated from the University of Iowa with a fine arts degree. He worked in a variety of jobs before devoting himself to writing full-time (or at least in tandem with his cattle farm in the Ozarks) in 1973.

His 1976 novel Cutter and Bone was filmed in 1981 as Cutter's Way. The New York Times called Cutter and Bone "the best novel of its kind in ten years." Another novel-to film Beautiful Kate was filmed in Australia in 2009 and starred Bryan Brown and Ben Mendelsohn. Thornburg died on May 9, 2011, a few days shy of his eighty-second birthday.

Diversion Books