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The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan
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The Ploughmen

A Novel

$17.96

Retail price: $19.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Jim Meskimen
Length 7 hours 54 minutes
Language English
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A young sheriff and a hardened killer form an uneasy and complicated bond in this mesmerizing first novel set on the plains of Montana.

Steeped in a lonesome Montana landscape as unyielding and raw as it is beautiful, Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen is a new classic in the literature of the American West.

At the center of this searing fever-dream of a novel are two menā€”a killer awaiting trial and a troubled young deputyā€”sitting across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell: John Gload, so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of seventy-seven, has he faced the prospect of long-term incarceration, and Valentine Millimaki, low man in the Copper County Sheriff's Department, who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest. With a disintegrating marriage further collapsing under the strain of his night duty, Millimaki finds himself seeking counsel from a man whose troubled past shares something essential with his own. Their uneasy friendship takes a startling turn with a brazen act of violence that yokes together the two haunted souls by the secrets they shareā€”and by the rugged country that keeps them.

Kim J. Zupan, a native Montanan, lives in Missoula and grew up in and around Great Falls, where much of The Ploughmen is set. For twenty-five years Zupan made a living as a carpenter while pursuing his writing. He has also worked as a smelterman, pro rodeo bareback rider, ranch hand, Alaska salmon fisherman, and presently teaches carpentry at Missoula College. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana.

Jim Meskimen is a stage, film, and television actor who has appeared in many well-known movies and television shows. He acted in Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon for director Ron Howard, both of which were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. His television appearances include The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Friends, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, and Parks and Recreation. He is also a painter, award-winning audiobook narrator, and audiobook director for Galaxy Audio.

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Reviews

ā€œKim Zupan has captured the feel of Montana: he has made a fine beginning.ā€

ā€œA terrific debut novel that evokes its western landscape with gorgeous prose, The Ploughmen is a powerful and at times painful story.ā€

ā€œMr. Zupan produces pleasurably lush and baroque prose, especially when describing his settingā€™s awesome and unforgiving topography.ā€

ā€œSet in northern Montana, the novel presents a powerful and implacable landscape, all dry soil and fractured river breaksā€¦The book features plenty of suspense. What it offers in addition are Zupanā€™s considerable skills with description and moodā€¦A dark and imaginative debut.ā€

ā€œPassionately arrestingā€¦Even though Zupanā€™s novel deals with grim topics, he plows the depths of grief and numbness with such a concentrated dedication that the prose is a character in itself. His sentences are unleashed in a furious splendorā€¦Bleak and brilliantā€”the best kind of book.ā€

ā€œStunningā€¦A remarkable novelā€¦Itā€™s a portrait of the West as a sometimes desolate and cold place, full of possibility, maybe, but also full of danger from every corner. Itā€™s a modern West, caught between the romance of the frontier and the mundane, harsh realities of living in the present day United States. And itā€™s absolutely beautiful, from its tragic opening scene to its tough, necessary end. Zupan is an unsparing writer but also a generous, deeply compassionate one.ā€

ā€œThe expansive, indifferent, and lonely landscapes that populate the book are as vital as the two main characters and elevate Mr. Zupanā€™s work from a story about an unlikely friendship to a solemn exploration of the human soulā€”and how it is formed by the space that surrounds it.ā€

ā€œA startlingly beautiful debut novel from a talented craftsmanā€¦Spare and emotionally devastating, this cannot be recommended highly enough.ā€

ā€œNuancedā€¦fascinatingā€¦What Zupan offers is a superb, retro prose style, channeling William Faulkner in long passages engorged with vocabulary, and meditations on what it means to be alive, if barely, in rural Montana circa 1980ā€¦A rich, morose meditation on death, law enforcement, and friendship.ā€

ā€œJim Meskimen gives a stellar performance in narrating this audiobook gemā€¦Meskimenā€™s versatile baritone has a gravelly quality that matches the vast Montana landscapes described by the author and the storyā€™s dark subject matter. His performance of the narrative sections is clear, with his tempo adding to the impact of each word. Each character has a unique and credible voice that is consistent throughout the performance. The discussions between Millimaki and Gload on life, death, and their attachment to the land are a splendid match of voice and text.ā€

ā€œA stunning work from the first pages to the last.ā€

ā€œKim Zupanā€™s The Ploughmen is one of the finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory, a book that stands alongside Richard Fordā€™s Rock Springs, Marilynne Robinsonā€™s Housekeeping, James Welchā€™s Fools Crowā€¦Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy at his best.ā€

ā€œSimply splendid; lyrical, surprising, authoritative, and starkly honest in its rendering of the human soul.ā€

ā€œAs good a book as Iā€™ve read in years. Luminousā€¦nothing short of brilliantā€¦a first novel that leaves me impatient for the next.ā€

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