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Start giftingThe Desert Crucible
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreZane Grey wrote this splendidly thrilling sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage in 1915, but for almost ninety years it existed in a profoundly censored version.
Young John Shefford, escaping from his troubled past in Illinois, heads west to follow up the curious legend of three people living imprisoned in Utah's isolated Surprise Valley, one of whom is a beautiful girl named Fay Larkin. Shefford, half in love with the girl he's never met, is determined to find the valley and free her—if she's still alive.
Shefford is nearly overwhelmed with his experiences of the beauty of the high desert, his first meetings with Indians, his ideas regarding Mormon men and their secret wives, and his encounter with real love, all of which work their changes in him. He comes out a man made true and good, finally freed from the shame he has harbored for so long.
Zane Grey® (1872–1939), born in Ohio, was practicing dentistry in New York when he and his wife published his first novel. Grey presented the West as a moral battleground in which his characters are destroyed because of their inability to change or are redeemed through a final confrontation with their past. The man whose name is synonymous with Westerns made his first trip west in 1907 at age thirty-five. More than 130 films have been based on his work.
Jim Gough’s distinctive voice is well known in the Southwest through his hundreds of commercials and radio shows. He has also appeared in such feature films as Urban Cowboy, Places in the Heart, and JFK. A native of Austin, Texas, he can also be found entertaining with his western swing band, the Cosmopolitan Cowboys.
Reviews
“Gough’s distinctive and thoroughly Western voice sets the stage for Grey’s fascinating sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage. These are timeless, articulate stories of the old, untamed Southwest…Gough lovingly reads Grey’s prosaic descriptions of the beauty of the high desert and Navajo culture. His perfectly cadenced reading and accents lend a true storyteller’s dimension to this romantic tale.”
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