These Thousand Hills (Big Sky)

When These Thousand Hills was published in 1956, The Saturday Review proclaimed it to be "so compelling that it is hard indeed to set aside until it has been devoured." Conjuring up the ephemeral world of cattle ranchers in the 1880s, this intimate saga delights in a Montana community's boisterous, wanderlusting eccentrics as they chase after love and their unbridled ambitions. At its center is Lat Evans, good-hearted and yet seduced by the possibilities for prosperity in his new life; gradually he discerns how the perils of the natural world, and most especially human nature, can conspire to frustrate a young man's best intentions. A lively, quixotic revisit to our historic youth, this literary classic deftly captures western drama at its finest, with all its accompanying toils of the heart.