Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

Fencing the Sky

A Novel

James Galvin

Picador

opens in a new window
opens in a new window Fencing the Sky Download image

ISBN10: 0312267347
ISBN13: 9780312267346

Trade Paperback

276 Pages

$21.00

CA$22.99

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

"He rode the horse all night and again slept riding. The dirt was as soft as flour and ankle deep. the horse covered ground like a cold front. He didn't care what that Indian was riding. Mike knew he was putting the miles between them. There were no fences anymore."


Galvin's haunting debut novel concerns an accidental murder—a tragic mishap that begins with the best intentions—in the contemporary American West. Stepping his horse through the lush, beaver-worked draw looking for stray cows, Mike Arans never imagined that he was about to kill a man by swinging a nylon lasso around his neck. Once the man was dead, Mike pulled a notepad and pencil stub from his pocket and wrote, "I did this." He signed the note and stuffed it into the dead man's breast pocket. Mike then returned home, stocked up on supplies, and within minutes was heading west.

Thus begins what turns out to be a dramatic escape into the rugged wilderness of northern Colorado and Wyoming. The novel's deeper story, however, goes back many years and confronts the issues that divide contemporary westerners. At its center are Ad, Oscar, and Mike, whose lives turn with the seasons and the rigors of ranch life—mountain-hardened men who do not possess but are themselves possessed by the land.

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.

Reviews

Praise for Fencing the Sky

"Part celebration and part angry lament, Fencing the Sky is a memorable debut, the most ambitious and original novel about the modern West to have appeared in some time . . . A first novel from poet/nonfiction writer Galvin about the ongoing destruction of western rangelands and the decline of the old, land-centered way of life. Mike Arans, a self-reliant cattleman, finds Meriweather Snipes, a canny, repellent land speculator and developer, stampeding cattle that have strayed onto the developer's land and, in a fit of anger, chases him. It's hard to say if what happens next is murder or an accident, but Mike, fearing the worst, takes his favorite horse and rides off into the remaining wilderness areas of Wyoming. His good friend Oscar, a bright, stubborn, struggling cattleman like Mike, does what he can to help Mike in his attempts to elude the law, and Galvin shuttles back and forth between Mike's cross-country flight and the history of the high plains over the past several decades as seen through Mike and Oscar's subsequent—and wrenching—attempts to make a go of cattle-raising. The economy has worked both to bankrupt small cattlemen and inspire a new and devastating land rush. The 'land pimps' (Galvin's phrase for developers) buy up large swaths of land from exhausted ranchers and turn it into small parcels to be peddled to ignorant romantics looking for a chance to live out their glossy vision of the West. But without the ranchers to maintain drainage, the little water available evaporates, trees die, and soil blows away. The new settlers resent the old ones, with their cattle and the fences vital to managing the range, and violence follows. Galvin works in this sorry history of the modern West skillfully, without slowing or diluting the drama of his story. His evocation of the hard specifics of ranching life and the satisfactions of physical labor, and the lyrical precision of his portrait of the western plains, are distinctive and deeply moving."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A unique and extraordinary book, a mixture of novel and natural history wherein Galvin reinvents the form, the true mark of a genius artist . . . I can't recommend it too highly."—Jim Harrison, author of The Road Home

"Galvin writes about the American West in a way few modern authors do, putting him the respectable company of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry . . . Galvin use[s] the best
dn0 poetry has to offer in terms of economy and meaning to give his prose a strength and purpose that dazzle and inform."—Cedar Rapids Gazette

"Galvin writes with laconic precision about a life he obviously knows well . . . This is an extraordinarily lyrical book."—Men's Journal

"You don't have to be a Great Plains cowboy to join in Galvin's powerful, haunting elegy for a lost way of life."—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"[Galvin's] prose is disciplined, beautifully unadorned, and unwaveringly true."—The Boston Book Review

"In his first novel, Galvin, better known as a poet and nonfiction writer, has created a passionate and lyrical chronicle of cultural clashes in the contemporary West. Recommended."—Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal

Reviews from Goodreads