Here are 57 books that Traveler's Companion to Montana History fans have personally recommended if you like
Traveler's Companion to Montana History.
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I am a history-phobe turned history fanatic thanks to a snippet of a family story about my great-grandmother. Casual interest morphed into a focused passion when I learned that she truly had homesteaded-- all by herself and in her late teens-- in eastern Montana in 1917. Her accomplishment inspired four years of research and writing, resulting in my first historical novel, Hattie Big Sky, which earned a Newbery Honor award and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, that bit of family lore revealed my purpose as a writer and I have since devoted my career to bringing the past alive for today’s young readers.
Evocative and clear-eyed introduction to the western landscape; this compelling read orients readers firmly in place and time. It’s carefully researched nonfiction that reads like a suspense thriller; you’ll spend many nights reading it past your bedtime.
A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award
"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. " --Washington Post Book World
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a history-phobe turned history fanatic thanks to a snippet of a family story about my great-grandmother. Casual interest morphed into a focused passion when I learned that she truly had homesteaded-- all by herself and in her late teens-- in eastern Montana in 1917. Her accomplishment inspired four years of research and writing, resulting in my first historical novel, Hattie Big Sky, which earned a Newbery Honor award and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, that bit of family lore revealed my purpose as a writer and I have since devoted my career to bringing the past alive for today’s young readers.
This book convinced me I would never have survived as a homesteader! Though not a professional writer, Wollaston does an incredible job of drawing in the reader and sharing heartwarming and heartwrenching details about the homesteader’s life.
"His memories flow as naturally as his writing. . . . The reader is transported back to the day when a six-year-old stepped from the train into a new life."-Smithsonian
As a grown man, Percy Wollaston almost never spoke of the homestead where he grew up-until, in 1972, nearing the age of 70, he wrote this book about his childhood years.
Lured by the government's promise of land and the promotional literature of the railroads, six-year-old Percy Wollaston's family left behind their home in North Dakota in 1909, heading West to "take up a claim." They settled near…
I am a history-phobe turned history fanatic thanks to a snippet of a family story about my great-grandmother. Casual interest morphed into a focused passion when I learned that she truly had homesteaded-- all by herself and in her late teens-- in eastern Montana in 1917. Her accomplishment inspired four years of research and writing, resulting in my first historical novel, Hattie Big Sky, which earned a Newbery Honor award and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, that bit of family lore revealed my purpose as a writer and I have since devoted my career to bringing the past alive for today’s young readers.
The story behind this book is nearly as fascinating as the book itself. Evelyn Cameron—Lady Cameron!—accompanied her ne’er do well husband to Montana with a scheme to raise thoroughbreds. When that failed, her husband fell into despair and it was up to Evelyn to put food on the table. She did that by photographing what she saw around her: everything from staged and romanticized “Western photos” that she sold to magazines back East, to interiors of dreary homestead claim shacks. Her glass plate negatives were converted to greenhouses after her passing but were thankfully discovered and restored, resulting in this incredible book of photographs.
Leaving behind her childhood world of the English gentry, Evelyn Cameron began ranching on the harsh and beautiful plains of eastern Montana in 1889 with her husband, Ewen. When their initial venture--raising polo ponies--failed, Evelyn turned to glass-plate photography to help support her family. Nearly 2,000 negatives remained in a friend's basement for 50 years after Evelyn's death until author Donna M. Lucey tracked down the exra-ordinary collection. Photographing Montana showcases more than 150 photographs of life in Montana from the 1890s through the 1920s. Evelyn Cameron's work portrays vast landscapes, range horses, cattle roundups, wheat harvests, community celebrations, and…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I am a history-phobe turned history fanatic thanks to a snippet of a family story about my great-grandmother. Casual interest morphed into a focused passion when I learned that she truly had homesteaded-- all by herself and in her late teens-- in eastern Montana in 1917. Her accomplishment inspired four years of research and writing, resulting in my first historical novel, Hattie Big Sky, which earned a Newbery Honor award and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, that bit of family lore revealed my purpose as a writer and I have since devoted my career to bringing the past alive for today’s young readers.
Dorothy M. Johnson wrote three short stories that were made into Western movies: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; The Hanging Tree; and A Man Called Horse. But this collection is a light-hearted visit to her childhood, growing up near Glacier National Park. A quick but delightful read to balance out some of the chewier reading I’ve suggested.
"[When You and I Were Young, Whitefish is] a lighthearted look into the life of a growing Western town in the early twentieth century. These fresh, jaunty tales of youth radiate good humor." -American West
My first introduction to the art of reading and storytelling was my dad’s bedtime stories. Sometimes he’d read a favorite, but most times he made them up; complete with sound effects. He was a journalist and inspired my love of reading and writing. My imagination was developed at an early age and shows no sign of slowing down or disappearing. I still gravitate toward fantasy, but am also a history buff and plan to read and write for the rest of my life.
Not only is Hattie Big Sky a Newbery Award Honor Book, it’s a beautifully written story based on the author’s own history and ancestors.
At the ripe ol’ age of sixteen, the main character, Hattie Brooks, moves to Montana to work the homestead of her great uncle. Alone, I might add. I felt Hattie’s fear, tragedy, determination, and triumph throughout the story.
This Newbery Honor winning, New York Times bestseller celebrates the true spirit of independence on the American frontier.
For most of her life, sixteen-year-old Hattie Brooks has been shuttled from one distant relative to another. Tired of being Hattie Here-and-There, she summons the courage to leave Iowa and move all by herself to Vida, Montana, to prove up on her late uncle’s homestead claim.
Under the big sky, Hattie braves hard weather, hard times, a cantankerous cow, and her own hopeless hand at the cookstove. Her quest to make a home is championed by new neighbors Perilee Mueller, her…
I’ve always been attracted to the overlooked, the obscure, the forbidden. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact I grew up in a time when it seemed natural to rebel against norms. Or maybe it’s that I inherited an oddball gene from some ancient ancestor. Anyway, it led me to interesting adventures—hanging out with a crew of gun runners in eastern Turkey—and interesting career choices—strike organizer, private detective, etc. It also shaped my reading and my writing. I read everything, but I’m particularly drawn to the quirky—Grendel, the fiction of Christine Rivera Garza for instance. And in my writing too: Lynerkim, the protagonist of my novella, is undoubtedly an odd duck.
There are three novellas collected in the volume titled Legends of the Fall. The first two, Legends of the Fall and Revenge, you almost certainly know from their movies. The third story, The Man Who Gave Up His Name, everyone ignores and it’s the one I recommend. In the story Nordstrom leaves his lucrative job, dances alone at night, goes to New York, battles a drug dealer, and ends up in the Florida Keys as a chef, dancing again. I love this story because I love Harrison’s use of language. His sentences attack. But mostly I love this story because it’s about a man struggling to find his place in life. That’s a situation I like to throw my characters into: reinvention, for good or bad. And the story of my own life.
New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison was one of America's most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. The classic Legends of the Fall is Harrison at his most memorable: a striking collection of novellas written with exceptional brilliance and a ferocious love of life. The title novella, "Legends of the Fall"--which was made into the film of the same name--is an epic, moving tale of three brothers fighting for justice in a world gone mad. Moving from the raw landscape of early twentieth-century Montana to the blood-drenched European battlefields of World War I and back again to Montana, Harrison's powerful…
A wind sorcerer. A dark spirit. An unsolved murder.
On the haunted Draakensky Windmill Estate, sketch artist Charlotte Knight arrives to live on the property, hired to illustrate the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke—a bright and lucrative opportunity to boost her struggling art career.
I’m a voracious reader, an author, and also a book critic, so hundreds of books cross my desk. What I love the most is the feeling of discovery—reading a book whose likes I haven’t seen on any bestseller list or on a front display in a bookstore. There are so many, many hidden gems—books that have stayed with me long after the publication day, and I always want others to have the same devotion to them that I do!
Henderson’s a prize winner and she should be on the top of every reader’s list! Here, she creates a protagonist like no other: a mortician Mary Crampton, living in a stomach-cramp of a town.
What’s surprising and wonderful is that she loves her work, and treats it as art—and I was so fascinated to learn about it. As her town crumbles away, a young man enters her life—a man whose brother was killed in a grain mill. As the two grow closer, the town becomes angrier, making Gal take new stock of the life she has—and the life she could create. So haunting!
High Plains Book Award Winner for Fiction * Western Writers of America Spur Award Winner for Best Contemporary Western Novel * WILLA Literary Award Winner in Contemporary Fiction * Montana Book Award Honor Book
With the quiet precision of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and the technical clarity of Mary Roach's Stiff, this is a novel about a young woman who comes most alive while working in her father's mortuary in a small, forgotten Western town.
"The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . "
It has always seemed to me that humans underestimate the abilities—and particularly the conscious lives—of non-human animals. We, humans, are not apart from (and above) but live in a continuum of consciousness with the rest of life. All these books share stories of relationships between human and non-human animals. They make clear that we are connected to and part of all life on Earth. We are all in this together, and we better take good care of our shared natural living world.
The author shares the details of a relationship she developed with a wild fox living near her home in the Montana mountains.
It is a beautiful evocation of the interface between the human and wild worlds. The fox would join her each afternoon, and she would read The Little Prince to him. They played games; she gave the fox eggs to eat, but he would hide them for her to find.
Fox’s tragic end emphasizes the challenges at the intersection of wildness and human civilization.
Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award * 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winner * Shortlisted for the John Burroughs Medal * Finalist for the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize * Shortlisted for a Reading the West Book Award
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year * 2021 Summer Reading Pick by BUZZFEED * NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * KIRKUS * TIME MAGAZINE * GOOD MORNING AMERICA * PEOPLE MAGAZINE * THE WASHINGTON POST
“The book everyone will be talking about … full of tenderness and understanding.”―The New York…
I have always followed writer Christopher Isherwood’s words: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” I am most comfortable as an observer, a documentarian, someone who gathers details, tries to make sense of them, lays them down in a presentable order, noticing colors, light, sounds, people’s behavior. Trying to make sense of life. I come from a divorced family, my father was murdered, and my first wife died of breast cancer. Still, there was plenty of laughter. I’m interested in and trying to figure out why we’re here.
McGuane sure kicked it off for me in terms of seeing a way to write new fiction. Story is not a priority in his world rather observation of characters battling the odds of surviving each day. The reader wants to be like some of the characters and run to the hills from others but the sense of humor, dirt under the fingernails of these singular people we’ll never meet, relationships we’ll never be in, and locations such as Livingston, Montana or Key West, Florida we won’t spend much time in, draws me to McGuane’s page. McGuane, who wrote scripts for Missouri Breaks and Rancho Deluxe, writes like a filmmaker – the smells, the weather, the alcohol, the drugs – the reader is in the scene, the sun on your neck, the dust in the air, the sound of the ice-cold creek. McGuane is a travel agent.
A novel about a former soldier in Big Sky Country whose life is spiraling out of control, from the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts, who is "among the most arresting and fascinating [writers] of his generation" (San Francisco Chronicle).
In McGuane's first novel set in his famed American West, 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…
The epic saga continues. Jarnland is in a frenzy of excitement. After the eccentric demise of Old King Wyllard, his co-Majesty, young Queen Esmeralda, announces a Royal Tournament to celebrate the return of our heroes from their perilous quest. The Main Event will be a duel between the legendary warrior…
Not only have I been a comic book editor for sixteen years and obsessed with indie comics for much longer, I’m also an avid camper who co-created and co-wrote a comic book series that exalts in the unique feeling of sleeping under the stars. As such, excellent comics about outdoor adventures have a particularly tender spot in my heart.
The immediacy of Whit Taylor’s work and its accessible, urgent symbology is especially poignant in this diary of her Montana road trip with her husband.
Diary comics are one of my favorite genres of graphic storytelling for reasons exemplified here: you are engaging with Whit’s experience with this sprawling, beautiful land and its brutal history alongside her. Big sky, to her pen, to your eyes. It’s an intimate experience, one that comics do best.
2021 Ignatz Award Nominee for Outstanding Minicomic 2021 PW Graphic Novel Critics Poll – Honorable Mention
Cartoonist Whit Taylor (The Nib, Fizzle) documents her road trip across Montana in this diary mini-comic, combining millennial humor with resonant observations about the state’s complicated history.
As she and her husband travel through semi-arid flatlands and sub-alpine mountains, Taylor reflects both on Montana’s breathtaking beauty and the enduring toll of Manifest Destiny on its land and people.
Balancing funny road trip anecdotes with thoughts on melting glaciers and the worrying prevalence of white nationalists, Montana Diary tells a slice of America’s story, knowing…
