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Content snapshot
Flag an inaccuracy →What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.
Violence
Barely any
Minimal violence; a tragic accident late in the novel
Language
Some
Some adult language in the modern sections
Sexual Content
Some
Adult relationships; period romantic content and an extramarital tension in the historical sections
Substance Use
Barely any
Social drinking; frontier-era alcohol use
Emotional Intensity
Some
A narrator defined by bitterness, loss, and physical limitation; the weight of a marriage's failure; generational disillusionment
What this book is about
Lyman Ward, a retired historian confined to a wheelchair by a degenerative bone disease and recently abandoned by his wife, retreats to his grandparents' California home to write their biography. Susan Burling Ward, his grandmother, was a genteel Eastern illustrator who followed her engineer husband Oliver into mining camps and frontier towns across the nineteenth-century West. As Lyman reconstructs Susan's story from her letters, he begins to see disturbing parallels with his own life. Stegner's Pulitzer Prize winner is one of the great American historical novels.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
A tragic late-novel accident
A narrator consumed by bitterness and grief
Subtle but persistent adult themes
Reader Verification
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