I find that I really love books in the Western genre that deal with the hardships and challenges of settling, especially those aspects that have been pretty much ignored in favor of shootouts and Indian uprisings. In The Homesman, Glendon Swarthout presents a situation straight from the history books, but about which I had never given a single thought. What happens when the situation literally drives a person mad?

Four women have succumbed to mental collapse, for various very understandable reasons, in a Nebraska settlement where there is no access to a sanatorium and no relatives to assist with their care. Someone must take these women East to Iowa, where a volunteer church group has promised to take them back to their homes and relatives. In the absence of any man willing, Mary Bee Cuddy, an unusual and brave spinster, takes on the job.

I was glued to every word of this amazing book. A film, of which I was totally unaware, was made in 2014. It starred Tommy Lee Jones (a personal favorite) and throughout the reading I could imagine him, as if the role of Briggs had been written for him. Perhaps it was. I have subsequently discovered that Swarthout was a prolific writer and many of his books were made into popular films, including The Shootist starring John Wayne.

I’m glad I stumbled across this one. Now to find the movie.
( )

Recently I have started reading a few Western Novels, and really enjoyed the landscape descriptions and the fast and hard narratives. I love a book that has a no nonsense approach with no wasted pages on romance and suchlike. A few months ago I discovered Vardis Fisher and was blown away with his book Mountain Man, so when The Homesman was recommended on the back of that novel I knew I had to snatch it up and start reading. The author was new to me, but when I googled him I realised that I had seen a few of the film adaptations of his books, I especially enjoyed The Shootist with John Wayne. Strangely though, very few of his books seem to be now in print and the only way to purchase is to spend a small fortune on Ebay. Luckily this book seems have benefitted from being made into a movie in 2014 and the novel republished as a tie in.

Based on a mixture of real life events (as explained by the author's son in the afterword) we follow the strange tales of four women who have moved to the territories with their husbands. Each has had an upset in their lives which has caused them to lose their minds and must be transported back East to the city where they can be cared for either by family or a lunatic asylum. The only problem with this is that someone must take them across the perilous desert, this is usually chosen by the husbands drawing lots and the 'loser' being the 'homesman' (the person designated to lead the trip). However, the man chosen refuses to accept responsibility and a single woman of means, named Cuddy volunteers to undertake the journey alone. On the way to collect the women she encounters a claim jumper who has been left astride his horse with a noose around his neck so that he may hang himself. Securing a promise of his help if she saves his life the journey begins.

There is so much to like about this book, the hardships endured by the settlers are really brought home, the life we think of when new settlers arrived is usually one of joy and plenty but the reality seems to have been a life of toil, illness and a real threat of starvation and survival of the fittest. Swartout really loves the country he describes and the research must have been a labour of love. As others have pointed out, this is almost an 'African Queen' set in the desert, but I much prefer the rough character of Briggs to that of Allnut, he seems so much more real. The term page turner is used far too much, but this really was worthy of that title, and the twists when they came were very unexpected and left me wondering where the tale would next take me.

Easily recommendable and when you consider this book was written in 1988 (thirty years ago and 130 years after the plot setting) it still has an authentic feel. A brilliant introduction to both the author and the genre. My only regret? There wasn't a sequel. ( )

You know how it is when you hear a name and think to yourself, “yeah I must read that”. But you never do. And you go on hearing that name off and on for the following years and you keep thinking that sooner or later you will read that book. But you never do.

And then one day you think, "that’s it, I am going to read that book”. But instead you read a different book by the same person. That’s how I came to be in front of The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout. It should have been The Shootist. But it wasn’t.

And so I started to read The Homesman and within mere minutes I was away, taken by the words of the late Glendon Swarthout.

Very soon I understood why, all those years ago, someone said to me, “Glendon Swarthout”. I’d rather forget the person who said that to me but unfortunately they are stuck inside me forever saying those two words. And I hate to admit to myself that they were right all along.

These people came to life and walked and talked right in front of me, so vivid I could smell them and shiver in the cold of their landscape. Their story became an unfolding, or rather a concentrating, drama for my pleasure. And it was. I loved every minute of it. ( )

Charged with transporting four women, minds broken by the hardships of the frontier, Mary Bee Cuddy enlists the reluctant help of a dispossessed claim jumper to help her.

Well, not enlists exactly. More like blackmails, since George Briggs escaped a slow hanging only due to Mary Bee's efforts. The unlikely partners then commence a tedious journey east toward Iowa, fighting each other, their occasionally raging passengers, the weather, and the land itself.

Swarthout keeps it honest. This is an 'African Queen' set in 1850s Nebraska, but George Briggs is no Charlie Allnutt -- he may drag their conveyance across the miles by main force and stubbornness, but will not reveal a heart of gold at the end, nor will he set up for happy-ever-after with Mary Bee.

This is a fine and honest book, honored by the Western Writers of America in 1988 as Best Western Historical Novel. Thirty years later, it still wears the laurel well. ( )

Sleeper hit of my reading year. Who would have expected my #1 book to be a western?

Winner of the Spur Award (long novel) from the Western Writers of America and the Western Heritage Association’s Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, making it indisputably the best western novel of 1988.

After 4 women, including her good friend Theoline Belknap, go insane in the Oklahoma Territory in the 1850s, Mary Bee Cuddy volunteers to take them back to family and/or asylums in Iowa. Realizing she can’t do it alone, she recruits claim jumper George Briggs whom she rescues from a lynching.

They face Indians, prejudice from outgoing wagon trains, and a vicious ice storm. Briggs knows how to handle the mules & the wagon repairs better than she does. Eventually as they near Iowa, Cuddy proposes to Briggs who refuses her, then comes to him in the night, naked. By the morning, she has hanged herself. Briggs continues on because there is $300 in it for him but once he reaches his destination, he finds that the bank on which the $50 notes are drawn is bankrupt. ( )