Books

True SistersSandra Dallas341 pages, hardcover: $24.99.St. Martin’s Press, 2012. In the 2012 presidential election, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged from the shadows with the first Mormon candidate for the nation’s highest office. Colorado writer Sandra Dallas’s 11th novel examines the history of a religion not widely understood outside its Utah base, […]

Elsewhere, CaliforniaDana Johnson276 pages, softcover: $15.95.Counterpoint, 2012. Dana Johnson’s thoughtful and affecting first novel, Elsewhere, California, is narrated by a girl named Avery, whom we first meet as a child growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s. When her brother is threatened by gangs, their parents decide to move to […]

Continental Divide: Wildlife, People and the Border Wall, Krista Schlyer, 292 pages. Softcover: $30, Texas A&M University Press, 2012 Walls do not solve problems; they make them. That is the simple, elegant premise of writer and photographer Krista Schlyer’s book Continental Divide, which chronicles the unintended ecological and social consequences of the wall along the […]

In Truth Like the Sun, Washington novelist Jim Lynch straddles two Seattles: the little-known Western town in the 1960s, on the brink of exploding into a world-class city, and the modern Seattle of four decades later, at the height of the dot-com boom. He braids these incarnations of the city into an intricate narrative of […]

In 1994, during a hiking trip in southeast Utah, a Pasadena trial lawyer named C. Joseph Greaves and his wife stumbled on two human skulls in a remote red-rock canyon. Each skull had what looked like a bullet hole through the back. Greaves became obsessed with untangling the story behind those skulls, spending more than […]

Award-winning adventure writer Peter Heller sets his debut novel, The Dog Stars, in an apocalypse-stricken Colorado, where Hig, one of the planet’s few survivors, flies around in an antique plane with a dog as his copilot. To this compelling frame, Heller adds adrenaline-pumping adventure, deep philosophical undercurrents … and a bit of love. In the […]

California writer T.C. Boyle’s 14th novel, San Miguel, continues his exploration of the Channel Islands, off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., which began with last year’s When The Killing’s Done. This time, Boyle focuses on windswept San Miguel Island and the histories of two very different families who inhabit it between 1888 and 1945. […]

Clair Martin is marked, not only by the “purple-red stain” that spreads across her left cheek and on down her neck, but by being an orphan with a preference for solitude — inconceivable to the Mormons of Brigham City in 19th-century Utah Territory, where she’s deposited at just 6 years old. Valued only as a […]

Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House into Our Home Sweet HomeMatthew Batt258 pages, softcover: $14.95Mariner, 2012. Matthew Batt is a perpetual student, earning his Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah while his wife, Jenae, works — until she finally gets tired of supporting his grad-school habit. “I got home from ‘class’ one night, […]

Theft BK Loren224 pages, softcover: $16.Counterpoint, 2012. Development’s brutal erosion of the landscape is a fact of life in the West. In the hands of lesser writers, it often becomes a cliché — shorthand for the destructive side of human nature and the grief and rage it provokes. Even when tackled by good writers, it […]

Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a LifeBy Harrison Candelaria Fletcher147 pages, softcover: $14.95.University of Nebraska Press, 2012. When Colorado writer Harrison Candelaria Fletcher was almost 2 years old, his father, a pharmacist, died, leaving behind a wife and five children. His mother, who was 29 years younger than her husband, grew up in a […]

Queen of AmericaLuis Alberto Urrea492 pages, softcover:$14.99.Little, Brown and Company, 2011.   It’s hard to be a saint, but being a saint’s father, husband or friend can’t be easy, either. ‘Not all crosses are made of wood,’ as Luis Alberto Urrea observes in his novel Queen of America. It’s a sequel to his 2005 book, […]