With the rugged beauty of the Rocky mountains as bakdrop, Pritchett's spare yet richly evocative stories portray the stark reality of life on a colorado cattle ranch.

Ike McAlister returns home to Kansas after the Civil War, his soul bruised and empty. Worse, his parents have been killed by Quantrill's raiders who are still on the loose. No stranger to death and destruction, he vows to run the killers down. A clue leads him to the high plains of Colorado, but when his sister, Sue, disappears from there, his world quickly spins out of control. In the midst of this turmoil, a feisty landlady sparks an attraction,...

"Libby is a bagger at the supermarket in town. She is also a new mother - not of her own child, but of her little sister's. Tess did not want the baby, but Libby convinced her not to have an abortion by promising to raise it - a promise Tess thought was crazy and Libby believed she would not have to keep. Now Tess has left for Durango and Libby pays rent to share a house with her mother on land neither of them own. She drives into town a few days...

Yuki is the daughter of a poor fisherman. Kiyo is the son of a senior executive at Chisso, a huge chemical conglomerate. In 1956, they meet and become friends, then gradually fall in love. But then all living things in the once beautiful Minamata Bay suddenly die. The impoverished people living around it begin suffering from a terrifying disease that causes agonizing pain, paralysis, and death . . . including Yuki’s family. With no fish to catch...

The year is 2675. Two scientists have found the abandoned laboratory of a dead colleague that contains the secret to the survival of humanity in a world of rapidly evolving environmental conditions.

Sheriff Jon had witnessed the cowardliness through his very own eyes as the Pastor Silas transformed and exported high into the sky. It was what the demonized pastor did when he felt threatened by the beautifully quaint township. But, the lawman still refused to acknowledge that the man of the cloth was the Malevolent Nephilim who had continued to commit a slew of crimes against the countryside folks.

Laura Mae Orlan knows in her heart that there is something, she doesn't know exactly what, but something amiss. Still, she falls undeniably in love with Michael and she has no doubt of his love for her. Or does she?

"After her mother’s untimely death, the young Corin Dunbar is banished to live with her aunt Jessie, an obsessively religious spinster who runs a failing cattle ranch near a speck of a town called Paradox in southeast Utah. It’s the mid-1950s, and Corin hates her new life until the Big Five Hollywood studios arrive, lured by the fiery red-rock scenery that provides a perfect backdrop to the blockbuster Westerns they plan to film. Overnight, Paradox...

By the mid 1960's, at the thrust of the Chicano Movement, Suzanna Montoya had settled in the city, gained a critical consciousness, and began to address urban concerns about race, class, and gender. Like many of her nameless Southwest contemporaries, Suzanna did her part where she lived on the west side of town, part of, but disenfranchised from the mainstream. Once again, Irene Blea, via Suzanna's analytical gift renders a colorful voice as she takes...

Captain Tom Woods, an escapee from Blacksburg, is on leave from serving under Colonel George Washington at Loyal Hannon. As he passes through Quaker country, a desperate little boy bursts out of a cornfield beseeching him for help. Following the child into the woods, he finds a Quaker woman who has clearly been foully used. With his caretaker heart, he cannot abandon her. Elizabeth Walker, having followed God all her life, naively believed nothing...