Ridgerunner
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4.2 • 140 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Winner
Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist
Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize winner Ridgerunner is now available as a paperback.
November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.
Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.
Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Ridgerunner is a heart-pounding survival story set in the 1910s against the majestic but unforgiving backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. Gil Adamson’s gripping novel starts with 12-year-old Jack—who’s tired of living under the care of an overly protective nun—heading into the Alberta woods to find his family’s secluded cabin. Meanwhile, Jack’s father, William Moreland, a legendary outlaw nicknamed the Ridgerunner, has set out to find his son after years on the run, and their harrowing paths inevitably collide. In Adamson’s talented hands, the harsh and beautiful mountain wilderness that surrounds them becomes a character all its own, with deadly threats from grizzlies to gunmen always lurking behind the next tree. But what really hooked us was the book’s duo of flawed but endearing protagonists. Is the yearning for home and family powerful enough to keep a man—or boy—alive? Ridgerunner left us pondering what we’d risk our lives for.
