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Book Summary and Reviews of Beartooth by Callan Wink

Beartooth by Callan Wink

Beartooth

A Novel

by Callan Wink

  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2025, 286 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Two brothers in dire straits, living on the edge of Yellowstone, agree to a desperate act of survival in this taut, propulsive novel reminiscent of the works of Peter Heller and Donald Ray Pollock.

In an aging, timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the grid, on the fringe of Yellowstone, surviving off the wild after the death of their father. Thad, the elder, is more capable of engaging with things like the truck registration, or the medical bills they can't afford from their father's fatal illness, or the tax lien on the cabin their grandfather built, while Hazen is ... different, more instinctual, deeply in tune with the natural world. Desperate for money, they are approached by a shadowy out-of-towner with a dangerous proposition that will change both of their lives forever. Beartooth is a fast-paced tale with moments of surprising poignancy set in the grandeur of the American West. Evoking the timeless voices of American pastoral storytelling, this is a bracing, masterful novel about survival, revenge, and the bond between brothers.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A novel of impeccable control and unflinching darkness. And then a glimmer of hope." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"In this transportive novel of two brothers living on the margins in the Beartooth mountains of Montana...Wink mesmerizes with his descriptions of nature and the men's survival skills, and he successfully portrays the brothers' humanity in their dance between struggling for dominance and wanting to support each other." —Publishers Weekly

"One of the best and fiercest heist stories since A Simple Plan ... Beartooth is unstoppable, the literary treasure you've been looking for." —Junot Diaz, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"I found something to love on every page of Beartooth, a moving and tightly drawn novel about two brothers trying to eke out a hardscrabble, sometimes illegal living on the edge of Yellowstone after their father dies. Callan Wink is a truly gifted writer." —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table

This information about Beartooth was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Callan Wink Author Biography

Callan Wink was born in Michigan in 1984. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. He is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Men's Journal, and The Best American Short Stories.

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