Montana Book Festival

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.

Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From... Read more »

Edie—smart, self assured, beautiful—always worked hard. She worked as a teller at a bank, she worked to save her first marriage, and later, she worked to raise her daughter even as her second marriage came apart. Really, Edie just wanted a good life, but everywhere she turned, her looks defined her. Two brothers fought over her. Her second... Read more »

An inspiring and eye-opening memoir showing how Democrats can reconnect with rural and red-state voters, from Montana’s three-term democratic senator.

Senator Jon Tester is a rare voice in Congress. He is the only United States senator who manages a full-time job outside of the Senate—as a farmer. But what has really come to distinguish Tester in... Read more »

An unflinching memoir from a writer reckoning with his relationship with his troubled father and the complicated legacy that each generation hands down to the next

“Justin Taylor’s relentless, peripatetic, and tender search for reconciliation with his late troubled father blooms into a full-throated song of joy about his own life lived through... Read more »

Before Rachel Carson, there was George Bird Grinnell—the man whose prophetic vision did nothing less than launch American conservation. George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated,... Read more »

When Bob Quinn was a kid, a stranger at a county fair gave him a few kernels of an unusual grain. Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family's farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn't health... Read more »

You are invited to the rest of your life.

Three women, from coast to coast and in between, open their mailboxes to the same intriguing invitation. Although leading entirely different lives, each has found herself at a similar, jarring crossroads. Right when these women thought they’d be comfortably settling into middle age, their carefully... Read more »

“Marvelous prose…McNamer’s book is full of it, and full too of an unwavering commitment to, and wonder at, humanity. Add to those its grand story, its fine sense of irony and humor, its emotional accuracy, and One Sweet Quarrel becomes one sweet — and unforgettable — novel.” — New York Times Book Review Leaving behind their provincial... Read more »

In Montanas Gravelly Range, paw prints and a single whisker discovered at a scene of horrific violence suggest a woman had been attacked and carried away by a mountain lion. Sheriff Martha Ettinger employs her fiancé, sometimes-detective Sean Stranahan, to put a name to the gnawed bones comprising all that is left of the body. The womans is the... Read more »

A new collection from a poet who has made "a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent" (Louise Glück). Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with personal poems of loss--a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents. Other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are... Read more »

In Eden Mine, the award-winning author of Black River examines the aftershocks of an act of domestic terrorism rooted in a small Montana town on the brink of abandonment, as it tears apart a family, tests the faith of a pastor and the loyalty of a sister, and mines the deep rifts that come when the reach of the government clashes with individual... Read more »

“In villages where women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks,” said Italo Calvino of the way imagination bridges the gap between everyday existence and an idealized alternative. The fifteen stories of Animal Wife are each about girls and women who cross this threshold seeking liberation from family... Read more »

"In Dundas' assured hands, one man's search for answers makes for a lyrical, riveting meditation on memory."--EW

One man knows the connection between two extraordinary acts of arson, fifteen years apart, in his Montana hometown--if only he could remember it.

Having lost much of his memory from a traumatic brain injury sustained in Iraq, army... Read more »

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty—a poet, a New Yorker, and an American—keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and... Read more »

The grizzly is one of North America's few remaining large predators. Their range is diminished, but they're spreading across the West again. Descending into valleys where once they were king, bears find the landscape they'd known for eons utterly changed by the new most dominant animal: humans. As the grizzlies approach, the people of the region... Read more »

The first book in a thrilling series featuring a wildlife biologist who courts trouble as she saves endangered species . . . and a mysterious killer who buries his dead in the land she helps preserve—a fast-paced, action-driven tale of suspense with the atmosphere and propulsive tension of works by Jane Harper, C. J. Box, William Kent Krueger,... Read more »

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a... Read more »