The stories of Gallatin Canyon are rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which Thomas McGuane is celebrated.Place exerts the power of destiny in these tales: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather around their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country: a father tries to buy his adult son’s way out of virginity; a convict turns cowhand on a ranch; a couple makes a fateful drive through a perilous gorge. McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.

Joe Starling, a man teetering on the edge of spectacular failures-as an artist, rancher, lover, and human being-is also a man of noble ambitions. His struggle to right himself is mesmerizing, hilarious, and profoundly moving.

Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict. His grandfather wants to run away to act in movies, his sister wants to burn the house down, and his new stallion is bent on killing him: all of them urgently require attention. But increasingly Patrick himself is spiraling out of control, into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane's Montana. Nowhere has McGuane mapped that territory more precisely — or with such tenderhearted lunacy — than in Nobody's Angel, a novel that places him in a genre of his own.

A physical novel in which Lucien Taylor, a native son of Montana, embarks on a half-witted, half-unwilling journey into self-discovery.

In a masterpiece of savage comedy, the author of the bestselling "Nothing But Blue Skies" writes of the perverse Whitelaw patriarch, a man who exerts his control, even in death, by means of a will that binds the family fortune to a failing marriage.