Finalist for
the
Spur
Award (Western Writers
of America)
Mountains &
Plains Booksellers’ Regional Book Award
Willa
Award (Women Writing the
West)
A Best Book of
2006—Rocky Mountain
News
Best New Literary
Novel 2007—Westword
Denver Post Best
Seller
Barnes & Noble
Book Club Selection
Best Book of
2006—The Docket
(Denver)
Recommended Summer
Reading—Rocky Mountain
News
««««««««««
Augusta Locke tells the story of one woman’s
troubled yet spirited life as she raises her daughter in the deserts
and lonely ranges of Wyoming. Spanning the twentieth century,
Augusta’s extraordinary challenges play out themes of love and loss,
home and family, redemption and reconciliation. Redolent of myth,
humor, strange landscapes, and stark reality, Augusta Locke
presents an indelible portrait of a woman who through great
toughness of character blazes her own
trail.
««««««««««
“William Haywood Henderson’s
Augusta Locke is such a gravely beautiful read that you
have to stop every few pages to catch your breath. The novel about a
woman growing up in the wilds of Wyoming is filled with sumptuous
paragraphs, including this one:
‘She watched a raven, saw how it listened,
where it focused, and she turned the same direction and pulled in a
sound. Some sounds were pure heat, the forest expanding and
steaming. Some had the shape of action, a shrill song, tapping. She
guessed at the path the sounds took—shuffling through groves, quick
across water, as far as sound could carry—and she guessed at what
gave rise to each sound, and what the sound meant for her, small
girl alone. She waited at the center to catch it all.’ ”
—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune cultural
critic
“Augusta Locke is an
uncommonly beautiful, haunting book. The writing is like prose
poetry, ethereal and earthy at the same time. As we move through
Gussie’s life, starting at the beginning of the 20th century, the
landscape of the American west comes across as a living thing.
Meanwhile, the characters who pass through her life are well-drawn,
memorable, and not at all simple, whether minor players or major
figures. …Henderson has managed to create one of the most arresting
female literary characters in quite some
time.”
—Philadelphia
Inquirer
“William Haywood Henderson understands the
emotional landscape of the American West, defined by loss, hope, and
life on the wing. And, like the birds that sweep through Augusta
Locke’s world, Henderson’s writing
soars.”
—Diane
Smith, author of Letters From
Yellowstone
“Henderson’s novel is an extraordinarily
beautiful creation, brought to the reader on the wings of the ravens
that serve as its protagonist’s familiars. Told in languorous prose
virtually encrusted with the details of nature—very reminiscent of
Annie Dillard—this story follows Gussie Locke through a lifetime of
wandering. … The tender descriptions of Gussie’s love for her child
are especially touching, given her hardness elsewhere. Rarely is a
woman portrayed in this way without reducing her to someone with
some kind of gender confusion, but Henderson avoids these clichés.
Gussie is truly her own kind of woman, and her own kind of mother.
As much a story of lineage and the meaning of family as it is a
story of nature, this novel covers a lot of ground in greater detail
than one would imagine possible in some 400 pages. Read slowly, and
enjoy this raw and haunting
tale.”
—Booklist,
starred review
“Augusta Locke is a fascinating and
powerful character, matter-of-fact and not self-pitying. … While she
spends her days anchored in the beauty and harshness of Western
landscapes…thoughts of her mother, Leota, her father, Brud, and her
daughter, Anne, recycle in her mind. So does the figure of Anne’s
father, Jack Fisher, who was but a one-night-stand in Gussie’s teen
years, on the verge of his departure for the Great War, although he
is to resurface in her life decades later in startling fashion. …
These characters become like fetish dolls that Gussie caresses over
and over in her mind’s eye, the past renewing itself,
phoenix-like…”
—Chicago
Tribune
“[Augusta Locke] resonates with
poetic beauty and complexity. … Like the many life-hardened pioneers
who have come before her, Gussie Locke is tough. Henderson creates a
woman who is achingly human in her unquenchable longing for
something of life that is more tangible, more meaningful. Even the
supporting cast of characters in Augusta Locke is
unexpectedly unique and complex. … [T]he novel echoes with deeper
themes of longing and abandonment, intimacy and loneliness. With
such keen attention to nuance, Henderson creates a world that is
both epic and universal and, perhaps above all, eminently
readable.”
—Rocky
Mountain News
“Emotions on a human scale - love and
loss, hope and longing - seem small things when set against
Wyoming’s expansive vistas. But when William Haywood Henderson
brings life and landscape together, human spirit is not dwarfed by
the harsh beauty surrounding it. Instead, in Henderson’s new novel,
Augusta Locke, the forces of tenacity, courage and sorrow
are brought into sharp relief by the spare
landscape.”
—Denver
Post
“Henderson’s novel explores the losses inherent
in a country where migration is the only constant. What makes a
family beyond the blood ties that don’t always bind? Some might say
that Gussie is a woman ahead of her time, making choices that ran
counter to the status quo of the period, but she is a woman who is
very much a part of the landscape of the open spaces of the West,
the places most emigrants bypassed on their way to move fertile
ground.”
—Billings
Gazette
“Henderson’s astonishing talents as
a descriptive, fluent writer are everywhere evident in Augusta
Locke.”
—The
Bloomsbury Review
“Haunting … The book’s particular
strengths are its unfolding of a unique woman’s life and its
depiction of places where the natural world awakens the senses and
commands respect, evoking awe and
wonder.”
—Library
Journal
“Against the enormous beauty of the American
[West] depicted in Henderson’s third novel, people cast small but
significant shadows while tending to families as fragile as fallen
leaves. The hero of this century-spanning epic is a tough, restless
woman, Augusta “Gussie” Locke. … Saturated with details of the
natural [West], Henderson’s work etches in high relief the image of
a solitary life among scenic riches.”
—Publisher’s
Weekly
