Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle was nothing short of spectacular. Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant. "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls's no nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car and fly a plane. And, with her husband Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle. Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa or Beryl Markham's West with the Night. Destined to become a classic, it will transfix audiences everywhere.

Outcast and wanderer, Joe Cobden, a half-breed hunchback, becomes Joe Buffalo, famed Kansas buffalo hunter of the 1870s until the buffalo herds diminish and he must learn to live a conventional life.

This epic Gothic Western about a half-Indian outcast who becomes a famous buffalo hunter is “a big sprawling novel of the West as it really was” (The Denver Post). Perhaps Joe Cobden was always destined to be an outcast. His Indian mother died in childbirth, alone on a stagecoach road under a pitch-black prairie sky. His white father abandoned him in the name of his own ambition. The wife of the doctor who adopted him despised him for his mixed race. His classmates teased him for his curved spine. Joe leaves nothing but pain behind as he lights out for the Kansas frontier.

It is the 1870s and Joe makes a name for himself as a famed buffalo hunter, tracking a phantom white buffalo from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. But his glory days as “Joe Buffalo” die as quickly as the slaughtered herds, and he finds himself forced to settle in Valley Forge, where the townsfolk each hide their own twisted secrets.

Heart of the Country paints a broad panorama of a demythologized American West, populated with unforgettable—and often unforgivable—characters, brought to life with stunning imagery and bold, baroque prose.