Montana Book Festival 2018

Four books, two fiction and two nonfiction, with one thing in common: the West! This will be a reading and discussion about that commonality and how four very different works came from it.

BRUCE HOLBERT is the author of Whiskey. Three generations of a Native American family struggle with hard lives, bad choices, and alcohol in this impressive novel. In the state of Washington, two brothers sit in their local tavern at a critical time. Andre is heading toward his second divorce from Claire, and Smoker is hunting his wayward wife so he can retrieve his 10-year-old daughter, Raven. The siblings embark on an odyssey that weaves through the book in scattered sections.

DONNA M. MCNAMARA is the author of A Birth of Justice: The Vigilantes of Virginia City. Lying in southwestern Montana are the towns of Virginia City and Nevada City. In 1864 the towns possessed the lure of instant wealth, excitement, and adventure that came from gold mines. Along with this excitement came danger-danger posed by men of unsavory character who would not stop at anything to get what they desired. Five men who were residents of the towns fought back by forming a Vigilance Committee with the goal of bringing justice to the men who terrorized the towns.

C.W. GUTHRIE

ERIC SCOTT FISCHL is the author The Trials of Solomon Parker. This is Butte, Montana in 1916, the Richest Hill on Earth: a metal-fueled boomtown of industry, pollution, labor unrest, vice, and crime.  The Gibraltar of Unionism, where a man can get a fair wage for fair work, or maybe get himself killed down the mine, one way or another.  Butte, where fortunes are made.  The city of the Copper Kings.