Two brothers in dire straits, living on the edge of Yellowstone, agree to a desperate act of survival in this taut, propulsive novel.
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“One of the best and fiercest heist stories since A Simple Plan . . . Beartooth is unstoppable, the literary treasure you’ve been looking for.”—Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Any reader seeking a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount’s TV hit Yellowstone would be well advised to pick up Beartooth. . . .These action-filled passages are absorbing, elegantly written and sometimes thrilling. . . . An original and impressive piece of work.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Like [Scott Smith’s] A Simple Plan, Beartooth is a gripping, rural-set adventure novel in which brothers make a terrible decision that permanently alters their lives and their relationship to each other. . . . Wink is a spare, exacting writer. It’s not until Beartooth reaches its raw conclusion that you realize there’s not a word out of place and that virtually all the events in the brothers’ doomed lives seem to have been forecast by the ominous first sentence.”—The Minnesota Star Tribune
“I found something to love on every page of Beartooth, a moving and tightly drawn novel about two brothers trying to eke out a hardscrabble, sometimes illegal living on the edge of Yellowstone after their father dies. Wink is a truly gifted writer.”—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table
“Beartooth blew me away. Wink writes with an elegant precision that makes the weight of sadness on the heart as palpable as the weight of a past-due notice in his characters’ hands. What begins as propulsively as a finely drawn thriller ultimately resolves itself into something much more profound than that, at times in contact with the ineffable itself. I read it in a single sitting, but I’ll be thinking about it for a long, long time to come.”—Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
“Beartooth sank its teeth into me. I had a hard time closing the covers, getting out of my chair, because I was truly utterly transported to the logging roads and snow-melt rivers of Montana. Wink treats nature as a holy altar and a widening mouth, and he writes a story that moves as fast as a bullet down a barrel. His characters and their troubles—especially the two misfit brothers at the heart of this novel—will live with me for a long time.”—Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon and The Comet Cycle
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In an aging, timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the grid, on the fringe of Yellowstone, surviving off the wild after the death of their father. Thad, the elder, is more capable of engaging with things like the truck registration, or the medical bills they can’t afford from their father’s fatal illness, or the tax lien on the cabin their grandfather built, while Hazen is . . . different, more instinctual, deeply in tune with the natural world. Desperate for money, they are approached by a shadowy out-of-towner with a dangerous proposition that will change both of their lives forever.
Beartooth is a fast-paced tale with moments of surprising poignancy set in the grandeur of the American West. Evoking the timeless voices of American pastoral storytelling, this is a bracing, masterful novel about survival, revenge, and the bond between brothers.
PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN: 9781954118027
Price: $27.00
On-sale date: 2/11/2025
Weight: 1.05 lbs.
CALLAN WINK has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River.