Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Historical adventure fiction

EPITAPH

Mary Doria Russell

A Novel of the O.K. Corral

Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sparrow, returns with EPITAPH, telling Wyatt Earp's real story.

A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media. A president loathed by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground and take law into their own hands. . . .That was America in 1881. All those forces came to bear on the afternoon of October 26 when Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers faced off against the Clantons and the McLaurys in Tombstone, Arizona. It should have been a simple misdemeanor arrest. Thirty seconds and thirty bullets later, three officers were wounded and three citizens lay dead in the dirt. Wyatt Earp was the last man standing, the only one unscathed. The lies began before the smoke cleared, but the gunfight at the O.K. Corral would soon become central to mythology about the Old West. EPITAPH tells Wyatt’s real story, unearthing the Homeric tragedy buried under 130 years of misrepresentation and sheer indifference to fact. Epic and intimate, this novel gives voice to the real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal thirty seconds in Tombstone. At its heart is the woman behind the myth: Josephine Sarah Marcus, who loved Wyatt Earp for forty-nine years and who carefully chipped away at the truth until she had crafted the heroic legend that would become the epitaph her husband deserved. Mary Doria Russell has been called one of the most versatile writers in contemporary American literature. Her novels are critically acclaimed commercial successes. Mary's guest lectures have proved popular from New Zealand to Germany as well as in the U.S. and Canada. Her previous novels (The Sparrow, Children of God, A Thread of Grace, Dreamers of the Day, and Doc) have been published in a variety of territories. Her works have been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, among many others. Several of her books have been optioned for film, including The Sparrow and Doc

Available products
Book Published 2015-03-01 by Ecco

Comments

Mary Doria Russell has lifted the participants in the frontier’s most famous gunfight out of the realm of genre fiction and catapulted them into the realm of literature.

Her writing is so vivid it seems she must have been there. … As Russell says, it matters where a tale begins and ends and “who tells the story and why … That makes all the difference.” Russell has made a big difference in bringing this story to life again.

Russell breathes new life into the well-worn western saga of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday’s infamous shoot-out in the Arizona Territory town of Tombstone… a raucously Hogarthian depiction of how the West was truly lived.

Russell catalogs [the action] with power and beauty and a calculating eye until, as a reader, …understand something primal about the making of famous moments: That the causes are never as simple as you want, and outcomes never as clean or clear.

Russell breathes new life into the well-worn western saga of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday’s infamous shoot-out in the Arizona Territory town of Tombstone… a raucously Hogarthian depiction of how the West was truly lived.

Mary Doria Russell’s EPITAPH has now hit a second 2015 best list: http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/seattle-times-critics-best-books-of-2015/ Read more...

Russell shows how the gunfight at the OK Corral is not the end of a hero’s tale but just 30 terrible seconds in a decades-long, nationwide struggle to evolve out of ignorance into enlightenment.

A magnificent sequel to Doc that represents a significant advance in her considerable narrative technique… Adroitly shifting points of view throughout, Russell assembles her cast in Tombstone, where her prodigious historical research illuminates the personalities and politics that propelled the combatants toward that corral.

Mary Doria Rusell’s Epitaph was named one of the best books of the year (2015) by the Washington Post

Well-written and provocative, Doc is a book that will haunt you.

Despite all that has been written and filmed about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, Russell’s pointedly anti-epic anti-romance is so epic and romantic that it whets the reader’s appetite for more.