Though its themes are weighty, West of Here is an electrifying epic and never bogs down despite its 500 pages - irreverent humour, lustrous prose, and unexpected moments animate a tale as vast as the land it inhabits. It's had superb attention in the US including high profile reviews from Vanity Fair, 'a booming, big hearted epic' and 'Riotously funny...wonderfully charming' from the New York Times.
West of Here opens at the Elwha River dam, where over a hundred years since settlers of the fictional town of Port Bonita tamed the river, their descendants gather in anticipation of the dam's blasting, and a new era of restoration. Across the next five hundred pages, Evison's story moves between 2006 and the town's earliest days at the close of the 19th century, overlaying stories of the people who passed through or dug in at Port Bonita, which swelled from settlement to town on the ragged shoreline of Washington State's Strait of Juan de Fuca. The past is populated by intrepid folk: an exploration party penetrating the Olympic Mountain range in the depths of winter, Klallam natives sickened by homeland eviction and whiskey, a young feminist at odds with motherhood, a prostitute doing covert battle with her whorehouse's owner, and an idealistic entrepreneur, blasting the river canyon into submission. In 2006, we meet their softer progeny: an ex-con who flees into the mountains with a stash of Snickers, the lonely parole officer determined to find him, a fish processing plant worker with a Bigfoot fixation, a native woman who rethinks her whole life when her son has a psychic break, and more memorable characters haunted by the past, by their unlived lives, by themselves.
'Riotously funny...wonderfully charming' New York Times
Author
About Jonathan Evison
Among many jobs before writing, Jonathan Evison worked as a caregiver. He was also a founding member of a Seattle punk band with future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. His debut novel All About Lulu won the Washington State Book Award and his second West of Here was a New York Times bestseller. Born in San Jose, he now lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington with his family.
