Book Club Classics Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature Westerns

Angle of Repose

Name: Angle of Repose
Rating: 4.24 (61896 reviews)
Author: Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner March 1, 1971

4.24 61.9k Ratings

Ongoing Status

13 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents’ remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America’s western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he’s willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

Wallace Stegner’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical.

Books similar to Angle of Repose

Stoner

★ 4.35

John Williams

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

Crossing to Safety

★ 4.16

Wallace Stegner

Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

All the Pretty Horses

★ 4.06

Cormac McCarthy

Teenager John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers, has nothing left to stay for. Across the border Mexico beckons—beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With neighbor Rawlins, and scruffy boy, he rides toward an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

The Last Picture Show

★ 4.01

Larry McMurtry

This is one of McMurtry's most memorable novels - the basis for the film of the same name. Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love.

Old School

★ 3.84

Tobias Wolff

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.

The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

Giants in the Earth

★ 4.02

O.E. Rølvaag

Giants in the Earth (Norwegian: Verdens Grøde) is a novel by Norwegian-American author Ole Edvart Rølvaag. First published in Norway as two books in 1924 and 1925, the author collaborated with Minnesotan Lincoln Colcord on the English translation.

The novel follows a Norwegian family's struggles as they try to make a new life as pioneers in the Dakota territory. Rølvaag is interested in psychology and the human cost of empire building, at a time when other writers focused on the glamor and romance of the West. The book reflects his personal experiences as a settler as well as the immigrant homesteader experience of his wife’s family. Both the grim realities of pioneering and the gloomy fatalism of the Norse mind are captured in depictions of snow storms, locusts, poverty, hunger, loneliness, homesickness, the difficulty of fitting into a new culture, and the estrangement of immigrant children who grow up in a new land. It is a novel at once palpably European and distinctly American.

Giants in the Earth was turned into an opera by Douglas Moore and Arnold Sundgaard; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1951.

How Green Was My Valley

★ 4.21

Richard Llewellyn

A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age.

Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons - at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory.

An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world.

Sometimes a Great Notion

★ 4.26

Ken Kesey

The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...

Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.