Larry McMurtry, The Wandering Hill

As a chronicler of the American West, Larry McMurtry has few rivals. He combines a gift for characterization with a sense of history’s sweep that makes his best work, like the Pulitzer winner Lonesome Dove, succeed as both regional saga and small-scale story of imperfect people in search of emotional connection. Wandering Hill picks up from last year’s Sin Killer to the story of the monumentally dysfunctional Berrybender family, British aristocrats who set out to carve out a niche in the 1830s frontier only to find that the frontier carves back. It’s a violent and bawdy black comedy that imagines the early days of white settlement in the West as disquietingly full of lunatics, hypocrites, and brutality—a dark evolution from earthy but uplifting novels like Dove and Terms of Endearment, and closer perhaps to T.C. Boyle or Little Big Man than what fans might be used to.