Heart of the Country

“A big sprawling novel of the West as it really was.” —The Denver Post
 
A dying Indian woman gives birth to a white man’s son under a pitch-black prairie sky. In the basement of a Kansas brothel, a husband tends the furnace while his wife services the clientele upstairs. A preacher’s mute daughter chases after a broken kite, paying no heed to the dangers lurking underfoot. An Englishman and his humpbacked guide track a phantom white buffalo from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and back again.
 
A saga as rich and complex as the history of the American West, Heart of the Country bursts at the seams with unforgettable characters and stunning imagery. Tracing the epic journey of Joe Cobden, a half-breed hunchback born on the side of a stagecoach road and raised in the genteel home of a St. Louis doctor, across the vast and unforgiving landscape of the Great Plains, author Greg Matthews exposes the savage truth behind the frontier myth and captures what it was really like to live and die in the Old West.
 
An enthralling adventure story that combines the poignant realism of Larry McMurtry with the gothic imagination of Stephen King, Heart of the Country is a masterpiece of historical fiction.