A lonely highway, a traveler, and a revolver . . . Teenage Rocky and his aunt Helen’s roadside discovery on a winter afternoon sets off a mysterious yet inevitable chain of events that will assemble citizens of Grouse County in a quest for knowledge, romance, and an occasional shared supper with a decent bottle of wine. Characters from Drury’s previous novels—the stoic sheriff, the red-headed photographer, the retired thief—are joined by a vibrant new cast including a trio of teens in a secret club named after a nineteenth-century suffragette, a reverend doctor who counsels her flock to perform good works and dance on houseboats, and an amateur film scholar who inspires a meet-cute in a plasma donation center.

Marked by uncanny dialogue, subversive humor, and indelible descriptions of natural and human beauty, West of Loveland is a warm and polyphonic portrait of a singular community navigating a version of contemporary life with grace and an enduring belief that something good might happen. Drury’s masterwork and the capstone of what is now the Grouse County quartet, West of Loveland offers a revolutionary view of the rural Midwest and a quiet homage to American democracy.

Praise for West of Loveland:

“I envy the readers who will be reading a Drury novel for the first time, and I rejoice with other readers who, like me, are long-time admirers of his work. With a wry humor, an insatiable thirst for storytelling, and a keen recognition of the beautiful strangeness in everyday life, Drury has delivered in West of Loveland a memorable novel that will make the world a less lonely and more mysterious place.”—Yiyun Li, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Things in Nature Merely Grow

“Drury’s world is so far from where we are that it seems to glow across the sky at intervals like a lunar heartbeat. Yet West of Loveland, a new and most welcome Grouse County novel, is also a strangely familiar ‘return to the state of loss we thought to remedy.’ ‘This place is dying for voices’ he tells us, and Tom Drury’s voice is like no one else’s. It was Chekov who insisted that a gun appearing in the first act must go off by the third, and it might occur to readers that Drury is a version of a future-tense, midwestern Chekov who nevertheless insists that all good, bright lives are shot through with a saving depth of darkness.”—Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Night Watch, Black Tickets, and Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir

“Tom Drury makes beautiful novels. West of Loveland is funny and heartbreaking, expansive and focused, episodic and cumulative, gorgeous and understated. The novel is profoundly American in its rhythms, its setting and its characters.”—Lan Samantha Chang, author of The Family Chao

“Tom Drury is a national treasure, and this is a masterpiece. No other writer has his eye for detail, his ear for dialogue, his tenderness, his humor, his attunement to the numinous and to community, his calm mesmerizing command of the cadences of plain description. ‘West of Loveland’ refers, in the novel, to the siren song of a secondhand postcard: inscribed with someone else’s memories, someone else’s story, the place beckons to various characters—‘We have to go’—because the fiction of it feels realer than their real lives. Every page of this book is as deep a dream as that postcard. West of Loveland, put simply, is west of Loveland: to read Tom Drury is to have to go to Grouse County.”—Bennett Sims, author of Other Minds and Other Stories

Praise for Tom Drury:

“A terrific book, and a strange one, as strange as the world and the great literature that helps us make our way through it.”—Daniel Handler, The New York Times Book Review on Pacific

“Drury is nothing less than a wizard. Not since Twin Peaks has the rural surreal had such an artful airing.”—Boston Globe on The Driftless Area

“Rich and readable . . . [Drury] possesses his made-up world with the same authority Sherwood Anderson brought to Winesburg, Ohio, and Faulkner to Yoknapatawpha County.”—USA Today on The End of Vandalism

“A beautiful book of quiet power that deserves recognition as a contemporary classic, with Drury one of our living masters.”—McSweeney’s Recommends on Pacific

“A gorgeous, inexplicably sad and funny novel about screwups trying to do better.”—Salon on Hunts in Dreams

“Drury ranks right up there with Robert Stone when it comes to depicting the futility of American wanderlust.”—Boston Globe on The Black Brook

“Remarkable. . . . Simply stuns you with the elegance and beauty of its writing.”—Entertainment Weekly on The End of Vandalism