Here are 65 books that Appaloosa fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up in central Arkansas, which means I experienced first-hand the fiction I describe here. The South in these books - its religion, poverty, and beauty, not to mention its capacity for real ugliness - is not simply an atmosphere these authors have used to decorate their sets. The South in these books is a place where real people live, in exactly the ways these writers have described. My novella, Six Mile Store, is my own take on the real South. These are the books that showed me that these kinds of Southern stories are worth telling.
The film adaptations make True Grit look like a Western. It is not.
It is an Arkansas book, and Mattie Ross is an Arkansas character: fourteen years old, tiny, and completely on board with the violence she knows avenging her father's murder will require. She has courage and goal-oriented ruthlessness.
Mattie’s fortitude underlines the gap between what my characters can see for themselves and what they can actually reach. That gap is at the heart of what my novella is about.
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…
I’ve loved both history and fantasy since I was a child. The first book I can remember reading at all was The Hobbit. The first historical novel I fell in love with was The Killer Angels. I visited the battlefield of Gettysburg with my family, and currently teach the movie every year to my high school film class. (I’ve never visited Middle Earth, but plan to visit New Zealand as soon as possible). I’ve been reading both genres ever since—and quite by accident my first novel contains a mix of both genres.
It purports to be historical fiction set in the Old West, following one of the last great cattle drives. Yet within a few chapters, it begins to feel like a series of episodes from Grimm’s fairy tales.
I remember at UC Irvine, where I earned my Fiction MFA, several fellow writers were reading this novel alongside me. We kept stopping each other in the hall or at cocktail parties to relive this or that chapter, struggling to understand how it could be both so entertaining and so good.
The fact that it is long—a real doorstopper of a book—adds to its “too-big-for-one-genre” feel.
Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a powerful, triumphant portrayal of the American West as it really was. From Texas to Montana, it follows cowboys on a grueling cattle drive through the wilderness.
It begins in the office of The Hat Creek Cattle Company of the Rio Grande. It ends as a journey into the heart of every adventurer who ever lived . . .
More than a love story, more than an adventure, Lonesome Dove is an epic: a monumental novel which embraces the spirit of the last defiant wilderness of America.
When I wrote The Shopkeeper, I wanted to write a different type of western. I love buddy stories. I also love fish-out-of-water stories. The Steve Dancy Tales combines both. More accurately, the first couple of novels maintain the fish-of-of-water storyline, but eventually, our shopkeeper gets the hang of the Wild West. Steve and his two friends, however, remain united throughout all seven books. They fight common foes, move through the western states, marry, have children, grow older, but remain fast friends. In fact, I consider Steve Dancy, Joseph McAllen, and Jeff Sharp friends of mine. I have sure spent a lot of time with them.
The Sacketts series is a classic western saga and this first book tells the story of two brothers bound by more than blood. A good buddy yarn works best when the protagonists are very different. The reader must also want all of these different characters to succeed. Orrin and Tyrel are an unusual and unbreakable team.
The first female police detective in Acapulco, Emilia Cruz, dives into an ocean of secrets and lies when she is forced to lead the investigation into her own lieutenant's murder.
Caught between the powerful head of the police union and resentful colleagues, Emilia becomes a pawn in a game of…
I am a writer and novelist who comes to storytelling via several curious paths. I am a historian trained in archival research and the collection of oral histories. I also come from a long line of ghost magnets–all of the women in my family have been for generations. And while I am living in blissful exile on the West Coast, my heart remains bound to my childhood home, the Great State of Texas.
When I cracked the spine on Patrick deWitt’s book, I knew I was in for a treat. Contract killers, endless bloodshed, and belly laughs? How could you go wrong? The novel is technically a Western, but represents a revisionist and darkly comedic pivot in the genre, following two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, from Oregon to San Francisco during the Gold Rush on their quest to murder a man called Hermann Kermit Warm, accused of stealing from their client.
One brother, Eli, questions his purpose in this world, while Charlie cannot satiate his blood lust, all with deadpan humor, which left me thinking hard about the nature of violence and man’s capacity for change, and a little worried about my own dark sense of humor.
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Across 1000 miles of Oregon desert his assassins, the notorious Eli and Charlies Sisters, ride - fighting, shooting, and drinking their way to Sacramento. But their prey isn't an easy mark, the road is long and bloody, and somewhere along the path Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for.
The Sisters Brothers pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable ribald tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from…
I have a life-long love of Westerns. I’ve researched the period and the events extensively. One of the first things I look for in any book I read is period accuracy. The books I write are historically accurate, though they are fiction. I’m on a mission, through my writing, to save the Western genre.
While this is a short story, not a novel, it is, in my opinion, the quintessential psychological Western. Depicting the struggle of an ordinary man saddled with extraordinary tasks, to maintain his honor and his values in the face of temptation, it delves into the minds of the two participants, and takes the reader on a wild ride as they wait for the train. Tension you could cut with a knife replaces action, keeping the reader on the edge of his/her seat until the end.
The New York Times-bestselling Grand Master of suspense deftly displays the other side of his genius, with seven classic western tales of destiny and fatal decision . . . and trust as essential to survival as it is hard-earned.
Trust was rare and precious in the wide-open towns that sprung up like weeds on America's frontier—with hustlers and hucksters arriving in droves by horse, coach, wagon, and rail, and gunmen working both sides of the law, all too eager to end a man's life with a well-placed bullet. In these classic tales that span more than five decades—including the first…
I’ve been fascinated by the Wild West since I was a little boy, playing Cowboy vs Indian with a plastic six-shooter and bow-and-arrow set. I grew up watching movies and reading books about the Wild West, and probably that sense of adventure and necessary courage required in such settings helped build the foundation that led me to join the Marines. It took guts to move out West. (Or desperation.) But either way, the settling of the Wild West is one of our core American stories. To me, the stories of the West are even more enthralling today than they were even fifty years ago.
A confederate soldier, Paul Cable, returns from the Civil War to find Union men have taken over his farm. Cable thinks his fighting is over, but he couldn’t be more wrong.
The book is tense and moves quickly. It’s also short, yet packs a punch far above its weight. Highly recommend.
A nail-biting, tough-talking classic western from the author of GET SHORTY and JACKIE BROWN.
In LAST STAND AT SABER RIVER, a Civil War veteran returns home to find a Yankee's private army living on his land, while another enemy waits to strike...
Paul Cable has fought - and lost - for the Confederacy but when he returns home he finds that his own war is far from over. The Union Army and two brothers - and a beautiful woman - have taken over Cable's spread and are refusing to give it back. But Cable is determined that no one is…
Nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Original Paperback, and winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award.
Francis Hoyt, arrogant, athletic, brilliant, manipulative and ruthless is a master burglar who specializes in stealing high-end silver and jewelry. He's never been caught in the act. Recently retired Connecticut state investigator Charlie…
I’ve been fascinated by the Wild West since I was a little boy, playing Cowboy vs Indian with a plastic six-shooter and bow-and-arrow set. I grew up watching movies and reading books about the Wild West, and probably that sense of adventure and necessary courage required in such settings helped build the foundation that led me to join the Marines. It took guts to move out West. (Or desperation.) But either way, the settling of the Wild West is one of our core American stories. To me, the stories of the West are even more enthralling today than they were even fifty years ago.
This book is a great read by Louis L'Amour, who’s arguably one of the greatest Western writers to ever live.
L'Amour executes the book brilliantly, placing a woman and her six-year-old son in grave danger from some angry, fired-up Apaches, who are on the warpath.
All that stands between them and their safety is one tough man and his dog.
As part of the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series, this edition contains exclusive bonus materials!
He was etched by the desert’s howling winds, a big, broad-shouldered man who knew the ways of the Apache and the ways of staying alive. She was a woman alone raising a young son on a remote Arizona ranch. And between Hondo Lane and Angie Lowe was the warrior Vittoro, whose people were preparing to rise against the white men. Now the pioneer woman, the gunman, and the Apache warrior are caught in a drama of love, war, and honor.
I’m an amalgam of all of my varied interests and varied employments from actress and singer to corporate paralegal at a movie studio. Since my teenage years, I’ve loved to research. That joy leads into writing factually-accurate historical fiction set in the West. Delving into the private lives of both the fictional and the real people gives the reader a better understanding of the characters’ designated paths leading to the events upon which my novel is based. My recommendations for the best books set in the West with in-depth characters have qualities I’ve employed in my novel. Some of these books also delve into characters from differing races, reflecting most towns in the Old West.
Perhaps Arizona’s most widely recognized event, the thirty seconds of gunfight at O.K. Corral in Tombstone isn’t the main emphasis in Epitaph. That belongs to Russell’s engrossing depictions of the intensely personal relationships between the Earp brothers, their girlfriends and wives, their routines, and addictions.
As I found out in researching for my novel, if you get the accurate facts about the personalities and actions of the good and the bad people, who actually lived in the Old West, you’re well on the way to writing a novel.
John Philip Clum started the newspaper in Tombstone and called it Epitaph, because “No tombstone is complete without its epitaph.” To complete your reading about the Old West, include Epitaph.
Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sparrow, returns with Epitaph. An American Iliad, this richly detailed and meticulously researched historical novel continues the story she began in Doc, following Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Tombstone, Arizona, and to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
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. . . .
I was an English major in college and my dream was to write the Great American Novel. My literary heroes were writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Jean Rhys, Margaret Drabble, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer. They “taught” me how to write. About a dozen years ago, I concentrated on writing crime novels, like Swann’s Last Song and Second Story Man, both of which were nominated for Shamus Awards (Second Story Man won the Beverly Hills Book Award.) I'm a magazine journalist and write nonfiction books, screenplays, plays, and book reviews. I teach writing here in New York City, and I’m on the Board of PrisonWrites and the New York Writers Workshop.
Like many of us, I’m fascinated by the Old West (maybe it’s all those cowboy shows and movies I watched as a kid).
The novel follows legendary Dalton Brothers gang (related to the Younger brothers who ran with Jesse and Frank James). I stumbled across Desperadoes, which artfully co-mingles truth and fiction.
Hansen uses the conceit of having a novel told in the form of a fictional memoir, written in 1937 by 65-year-old Emmett Dalton, the last surviving member of the infamous gang.
Hansen centers his action around the gang’s plot to rob two banks in Coffeyville, Kansas, and it’s a master class in the art of blending fact and fiction.
It’s something I’ve tried to do in my book, which incorporates into the plot an actual plot to knock over a “mob bank,” backed by a real-life New England mob boss.
At age 65, Emmett Dalton, the sole survivor of the infamous Dalton gang makes a living by selling his outrageous adventure stories to Hollywood. Desperadoes details his memories of the murders, bootlegging and thievery he and his posse committed. The grit and excitement of these violent times are expertly evoked by the sharp pen and authentic voice of HarperCollins' bestselling author Ron Hansen.
Nate Champion might be the most heroic figure of America’s Old West ... and yet one of popular history’s best-kept secrets. Now he finally gets his due in this historical novel duology. His humble beginnings in Texas prepare him for a life with horses and cattle. Though a well-known horse…
Growing up, I've always been attracted to the fantasy genre; I've been obsessed ever since my teacher introduced me to it in the first grade. What started as innocent fairy books evolved to dark, spicy fantasy romance/romantasy. Now, in addition to staying up way past my bedtime reading, I'm a teenage author of my own YA fantasy romance book, Masks of Faded Dreams. This genre has truly changed my life. As cliche as that sounds, it's true; it's both my form of escapism and an eye-opening experience into worlds I'd never known existed.
Dance of Thieves...more like Thieves of My Heart. Seriously, this book stole my heart.
From the first few pages, I knew there was something incredibly special about this story. Kazi and Jase embody that rich x poor dynamic and warmed my heart instantly. They both deal with so many personal issues that they handle in different ways; I love how it shows how there are many ways to grieve, and seeing as I was going through a difficult time while reading, it was a part of my healing journey.
The angst was on a whole other level. Although it was a bit political intrigue-heavy, the romance DID NOT disappoint. It left me staying up well past midnight to finish their story.
'Mary E. Pearson is a fearless storyteller' Stephanie Garber
A reformed thief and the young leader of an outlaw dynasty lock wits in a battle that may cost them their lives, and their hearts, in a new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Remnant Chronicles.
When the patriarch of the Ballenger empire dies, his son, Jase, becomes its new leader. Even nearby kingdoms bow to the strength of this outlaw family, who have always governed by their own rules. But a new era looms on the horizon, set in motion by a young queen, which makes…
