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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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THE HOMESMAN

Glendon Swarthout

This is the basis of the motion picture directed by Tommy Lee Jones, which will be released at some point next year. Soon to be a major film directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones and co-starring Meryl Streep, Hilary Swank, and John Lithgow, this classic Western novel captures the devastating realities of early frontier life through the eyes of one extraordinary woman.
The Homesman opens in the 1850s, when early pioneers are doing anything they can to survive dreadful conditions. Women especially struggle with broken hearts and minds as they face bitter hardships: One nineteen-year-old mother loses her three children to diphtheria in three days; another woman left alone for two nights is forced to shoot wolves to protect herself.

The situation calls for a “homesman”—a person charged with taking these women, driven mad by the conditions of rural life, to asylums in the East. Not exactly a job people are lining up for, it falls to Mary Bee Cuddy, an ex-teacher and spinster, who is indomitable, resourceful, and “plain as an old tin pail.” Brave as she is, Mary Bee knows she can’t make it alone, so she takes along her only available companion: the lowlife and untrustworthy George Briggs.

Mary Bee and George know it won’t be easy, but their endurance is truly tested as they fight the tide of colonization, Indian attacks, ice storms, loneliness, and the unceasing aggravation of a disparate group of mad women. This is the tale of their journey and a tribute to the men and women who homesteaded the frontier, whether they survived or not.

Winner of both the Spur Award and the Wrangler (Best Western Novel) Award in 1988, The Homesman is fiction of the highest rank. Glendon Swarthout has created a magnificent tale and a portrait of a frontier woman who is as moving and believable as she is unforgettable.

Glendon Swarthout wrote sixteen novels, many of which were bestsellers and were made into films, among them Seventh Cavalry, They Came to Cordura, Where the Boys Are, Bless the Beasts & Children, and A Christmas to Remember. He was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and won a number of other awards, including the Western Writers Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Available products
Book

Published 2014-02-01 by Simon

Book

Published 2014-02-01 by Simon

Comments

I tell friends what The Homesman is about and their eyes open wide and they can't wait to read it. And that's just the plot. Swarthout puts you there, in time and place. I love the way he writes.

No reader should even attempt to guess what happens. Surprise piles upon surprise... Glendon Swarthout has honed writing excellence to a nearly unsurpassable level... A powerful novel... A classic of vivid realism and gripping storytelling.

Totally involving from its very first words... a dangerous journey into the soul, an exploration of the relationships of men and women to each other, to their environments and—ultimately most devastatingly—to themselves.

One of Swarthout's best... An absorbing epic of endurance.