Crossing Purgatory
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the spring of 1858, Thompson Grey, a younger farmer, travels to his father''s estate seeking funds to expand his holdings. Far overstaying his visit, he returns home to find that his absence has contributed to a devastating family tragedy. Haunted by remorse, Thompson abandons his farm and begins a westward exile in the attempt to outpace his grief. During his wanderings, he encounters emigrants along the Santa Fe Trail who force him to assert his values and re-awaken his connection with humanity. Unwittingly, he finds himself at journey''s end in the one place where his strongest temptations are able to overtake him and once again put him to the test. Crossing Purgatory deals with questions of unprincipled ambition, guilt, and the price one man is willing to pay for atonement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This striking tale, a literary western from Schanbacher (Migration Patterns), chronicles one momentous year in the life of a plainsman on the eve of the American Civil War. The young farmer, Thompson Grey, is stricken with grief and guilt after his wife, Rachel, and two sons, Matthew and Daniel, die from diphtheria while he's away asking his wealthy planter father, Reverend Matthew Grey, for an advance on his inheritance. Leaving his Indiana homestead in the hopes that "he might outpace his grief," he joins up in Kansas with Captain John Upperdine, who's guiding a wagon train that includes the pregnant Hanna Light and her son, Joseph, whom Thompson befriends. He and the Lights elect to accept Upperdine's invitation to stay a while at his Kansas ranch, also farmed by the colorful Benito Ibarra a relation of Upperdine's wife, Genoveva. The ranchers survive a ravenous plague of grasshoppers, Hanna gives birth to a daughter she names Destiny, and Thompson experiments with growing a new variety of wheat. They gut it through the harsh winter before Thompson finally comes to terms with his loss at the climax of Schanbacher's visceral and triumphant saga of the Old West.
