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Books by WSU alumni and friends
Fiction
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Angel of the Gold Rush: A Novel of Early California
By B. J. Scott ('68 Sp. Comm.)
Kathleen Connelly—Irish immigrant, widowed on the way to the California gold fields—fought nature and man to found a far-flung empire built on gold. To Indians she was a blue-eyed devil who could not die. To gold miners she was both a fearless adversary who backed down from no one, and a friend so generous and fair, she became known as . . . the Angel of the Gold Rush.
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Angel's Daughter: Book Two of the Angel Trilogy
B.J. Scott ('68 Sp. Comm.)
The Connellys are back! The formidable females introduced in 2004's Angel of the Gold Rush return as an old enemy arises again, and allies himself with a new, more deadly foe. Corruption reaching to the highest levels of the building of the new state of California poses a threat to the Connelly empire. The pace never slackens as Kathleen and her daughters Megan and Danielle battle enemies at home and abroad in Book Two of the Angel Trilogy.
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Bel Canto
By Ann Patchett
Recommended by Kim Barnes '85, writer, teacher, and Idaho's Writer in Residence. Barnes has been wanting to read this book for a long time "just for the level of craft, her ability to bring all these characters in one room and set them in motion."
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Beyond the Gates of Heaven
Expedito A. Ibarbia
A young maverick upstart crafts his way into the hearts of a hostile and possessive farming tycoon and his enigmatic daughter who are at odds with each other over a mysterious old woman and a young imposter. Dramatic twists and turns unfold, as the mongrel Adonis navigates his way into the farming empire caught up in the brewing conflict between the tycoon's daughter, bent on adopting the mysterious woman, and the tycoon, desperate to foil imagined intrusions into his crumbling family by the woman and by the imposter who goes to court claiming to be his long-lost son. Pulse-pounding events unravel a poignant story of rejection, betrayal, and redemption in the lives of the characters drawn into the web of conflicting emotions, as both the tycoon and the upstart struggle to forget, but not to forgive, family members involved in their past abandonment.
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Breederman
By Murray Anderson
Author Murray Anderson weaves his experiences as a herdsman, milk tester, milking machine salesman, artificial inseminator, and fieldsman into a novel that describes the struggle for survival of small farmers in northwest Washington.
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Buried in the Records
By Dave Pratt '76
From the publisher: When patients check into a hospital, they put their trust and lives in the hands of strangers who promise care, compassion, and a cure. For those admitted to Wilkes Memorial Hospital in Washington State’s capital city, that trust may be misplaced to the extent of murder. Bill Deming is a medical intelligence officer turned financial consultant on assignment to audit Wilkes Memorial Hospital for a prospective patron. It is a pleasant coincidence that this routine assignment takes Bill to the town of his youth and first romance after 20 years away. It doesn’t take long before the Wilkes audit turns anything but routine, and instead uncovers a trail of questionable finances, suspicious patient deaths, and murder. With the help of a brilliant and attractive young nurse and her detective brother, what Bill uncovers threatens his job, his life, and the life of a newfound love.
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Donna Rose and the Slug War
By Norma Tadlock Johnson ('49 Home Ec.)
Donna Rose and the Slug War is a rich quilt of small-town Americana, a tale of backyard competition and long-lost secrets—some important enough to kill over. Retired schoolteacher Donna Galbreath isn’t as patient with ignorant people as she once was, but she loves her community of Cedar Harbor, Washington. Cedar Harbor is changing, though, and this is brought home when she finds the body of Lyle Corrigan, the water board chairman, while on an early morning clam-digging foray. After attacks are made on Lyle’s widow and then on Donna, herself, she begins to investigate—along with her neighbor Cyrus, who rescues her and feels that henceforth, protecting Donna has become his duty. The solution requires sorting out the people who had reason to dislike Lyle. In the end, long-held secrets are brought to light and justice is served, along with a peace, of sorts.
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Eighty-Sixed: A Compendium of the Hapless
by Brian Ames '85
From Publisher's Weekly: Wilderness, both physical and emotional, is a common thread in this scintillating, arresting collection. Armed with an unfettered imagination and razor-sharp prose, Ames conjures a malevolent fictional world where violence is an ever-present threat. Largely set in rural Washington State, these stories take as their primary subjects men on the fringes--a snow-plow operator, a mechanic/hit man, a small-time drug dealer--flummoxed by fate and by their own gross flaws. In one of the best, "Ajax the God," a washed-up major leaguer shoots a six-point elk and tracks the wounded animal through the forest, ruminating as he goes on his long-lost days as a celebrated pitching prospect. Ames also shows a playful side. "Monocle," the strange account of a man born with a single, cyclopean eye, is a delight, a whimsical tale in which the author wisely plays it straight for maximum comic effect. A few of these 22 pieces feel incomplete, but even when the occasional story fails to deliver, the sheer force of Ames’s imagination and the wild energy of his language will make readers sit up straight.
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Finding Caruso
By Kim Barnes '85
From the publisher: When Buddy and Lee Hope find themselves orphaned and broke in 1957, the brothers set off for the logging camps of northern Idaho. Though seven years apart, the young men are very close—that is, until Lee, the older of the two, falls hard for an older woman. But this experienced lover has someone else in mind: Buddy.
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Head Full of Traffic
Brian Ames '85
Head Full of Traffic dishes up nearly two dozen tales of deliciously dark doomsday scenarios. Author Brian Ames delivers a tour-de-force of not-quite-classifiable fantasy horror pieces. Grab a brush and paint in Istvan's warped world. Wake up with Brandon Verity, spokesman for Pacific Northwest Power & Light. Slow down vehicles with Randy and his road crew. Guaranteed to send a chill or two up your spine.
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Horses They Rode
By Sid Gustafson '77
Horses They Rode is a dramatic story of love, family, and changing cultures. It takes place along the rugged Rocky Mountain Front in Montana, where ranchers and Native Americans uneasily share the vast landscape with each other, wild animals, and fast horses. Bruised from a divorce, Wendel Ingraham abandons his hardscrabble life as a racehorse trainer and returns to the mountain foothill ranch where he was raised. There he confronts his past and tries to build a future with his young daughter. The novel lyrically weaves his journey through women, children, horses, and Indian spirituality, culminating in a dramatic horse race. Gustafson's beautifully crafted writing limns the intense and complex interactions between men and women, fathers and daughters, Native Americans and whites, and animals and nature. His storytelling and language are full of rhythm and surprise.
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I Only Smoke on Thursdays
By Georgie Nickell '94
I Only Smoke on Thursdays is the how-to manual of a single Seattle twenty-something learning to overcome grief and find someone meaningful amid a sea of duds, patterned along the same acerbic lines as Bridget Jones’s Diary.
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Index of Suspicion
By Robert E. Armstrong '62
From the publisher: The presidential election is about to kick off when the front running candidate is attacked by a raging cat that he encounters inside his darkened limousine. By curious happenstance Dr. Duncan MacDonell, the feisty Houston veterinarian, is the first person on the scene. Things go from bad to worse, as the election process is disrupted and MacDonell finds himself the prime target of an intense FBI investigation. Dr. Mac needs all his diagnostic skills to untangle the mystery and clear his name.
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Indian Killer
By Sherman Alexie '94
From the publisher: A murderer is stalking and scalping white men in Seattle. While this so-called Indian Killer terrorizes the city, its Native American population is thrown into turmoil. John Smith, an Indian adopted as a newborn baby into a white family, is increasingly dissatisfied with his life and dreams of the existence he might have led on the reservation –he is gently descending into madness. In his search for connection he meets Marie, a strident young student at the local university who is isolated from her tribe; she is highly educated, but not in her own traditions. Marie is particularly enraged with people such as Jack Wilson, a local ex-cop and now a popular mystery writer who passes himself off as part Indian in a desperate attempt at acceptance. Jack is determined to write about the brutal killings in his next novel, a novel that he believes will truly reveal what it is like to be Indian. With each new murder, the city is gripped by fear, and hate crimes perpetrated by white men against the Native American community grow increasingly violent. As the murderer searches for his latest victim, and the Indian population of Seattle is filled with a strange combination of fear and relief, Indian Killer builds to an unexpected and terrifying climax.
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Into the Forest
By Jean Hegland '79
Eva, 18, and Nell, 17, are sisters, adolescents on the threshold of womanhood—and for them anything should be possible. But even as Eva prepares for an audition with the San Francisco Ballet and Nell dreams of her first semester at Harvard, their lives are turned upside down and their dreams are pushed into the shadows. In a nation suddenly without electricity or communications, Eva is compelled to dance alone to the music of memory, and Nell's education consists of reading the encyclopedia, devouring knowledge as if it were her last meal. Theirs is an age of darkness and terror.
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Letters from Yellowstone
By Diane Smith
Recommended by Tonie Fitzgerald, WSU/Spokane County extension faculty. The novel follows a lone woman, an amateur botanist, in a party of authorities from the Smithsonian Institution. Her compelling story is told in letters and telegrams.
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Master and Commander
By Patrick O'Brian
Recommended by Marina Tolmacheva, historian. A seafaring adventure set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, this book is the first in a series that offers a good tale rich with historical details.
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Mote in God's Eye
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Recommended by Brian Tissot, environmental scientist, WSU Vancouver. This work of science fiction focuses on the first contact with an intelligent alien race and a culture much older than our own. It illuminates some interesting issues facing mankind.
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Prisoners of Flight
By Sid Gustafson '77
Two ex-military pilots, Gustafson’s protagonist and his comrade, Henson, crash their plane into wilderness alongside Montana’s Flathead River. Former Vietnam POWs, they have wrestled with life’s trials ever since, holding to a single constant: a fierce longing for an idealized sky. Says Gustafson’s protagonist: “The flying rule is: When in doubt, do nothing. But I’m not flying anymore.” For indeed, Gustafson's characters are themselves fallen forms of the angels they seek.
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Renaissance Cop
By Neil Moloney '53
This is the second in a series of three books by Neil Moloney '53, former chief of the Washington State patrol and director of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. The author takes the reader on a joyride of police experiences, from the rooky cop's on-the-job training through a series of violent-crime investigations by experienced detectives. Eventually, the officers are faced with the necessity to investigate the seamier side of police misconduct and political corruption.
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Reservation Blues
By Sherman Alexie '94
From the publisher: Winner of the American Book Award and a critically acclaimed national best seller, Reservation Blues continues to find new and adoring readers in academic and popular circles alike. In 1931, Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil, receiving legendary blues skills in return. He went on to record only twenty-nine songs before being murdered on August 16, 1938. In 1992, however, Johnson suddenly reappears on the Spokane Indian Reservation and meets Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe. When Johnson passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas—lead singer of the rock-and-roll band Coyote Springs—a magical odyssey begins that will take the band from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan. Sherman Alexie imaginatively mixes narrative, newspaper excerpts, songs, journal entries, visions, radio interviews, and dreams to explore the effects of Christianity on Native Americans in the late twentieth century. In addition, he examines the impact of cultural assimilation on the relationships between Indian women and Indian men. Reservation Blues is a painful, humorous, and ultimately redemptive symphony about God and indifference, faith and alcoholism, family and hunger, sex and death.
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Salt Lick
by Brian Ames '85
Consider a common item of husbandry: the salt lick. Name a rural town after it. Put in authority a megalomaniacal mayor. Populate it with foothills people bent to do his bidding. Set in the Cascades, Salt Lick shakes and burns as their lives carom from the orderly to the boundaries of control and beyond. Whether Salt Lick’s citizens survive the resulting mayhem brews a black comedy part David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, part Russell Banks’ Trailer Park.
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Shebang
By Valerie Vogrin '83
Shebang is the rollicking story of an aunt and her nephew thrown together to fashion a family. When the matron of an Alabama catering family dies, Fin Sweetleaf, thirty-ish and single, inherits a business in disarray and a 16-year-old nephew yearning for normalcy. These two mismatched orphans, Fin and Hector Sweetleaf, must form a family in the wake of the domineering matron’s death. Steeped in the rough mysteries and quirkiness of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Shebang celebrates the intricate web of family life—the families we’re born into, and the families we create out of necessity.
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Smoke Follows Beauty
by Brian Ames '85
With a distinctly rural sense of place and unforgettable characters, Smoke Follows Beauty takes readers along on a hunt for wonder whose game is satisfaction. These tales echo those meant to be spoken around the half-light of campfires, and seek to restore a needed measure of awe and mystery to life. Ames '85 offers eclectic subject matter - from hunting to horseshoeing, rescue to unprecedented disaster, colonial Africa, a mountain elk-hunting blind, a bar down the street, to a pleasant apocalypse. Smoke Follows Beauty engages an exploration of the spiritual, paranormal, metaphysical - in the darkest, most ancient parts of the forest, where vapors gather, rise, take shape.
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Smoke Signals: A Screenplay
By Sherman Alexie '94
From the publisher: Set in Arizona, Smoke Signals is the story of two Native American boys on a journey. Victor is the stoic, handsome son of an alcoholic father who has abandoned his family. Thomas is a gregarious, goofy young man who lost both his parents in a fire at a very young age. Through storytelling, Thomas makes every effort to connect with the people around him: Victor, in contrast, uses his quiet countenance to gain strength and confidence. When Victor's estranged father dies, the two men embark on an adventure to Phoenix to collect the ashes. Along the way, Smoke Signals illustrates the ties that bind these two very different young men and embraces the lessons they learn from one another.
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Ten Little Indians
By Sherman Alexie '94
From the publisher: Sherman Alexie is one of today's most captivating and popular writers. The Nation has called him "a master of language, writing beautifully, unsparingly, and straight to the heart." Now with Ten Little Indians he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heart-rending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love.
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The Blight Way
By Patrick F. McManus '56, '62
In The Blight Way, Patrick McManus '56, '62 ventures into the mystery genre with the first installment in a new comic crime fiction series set in the Idaho Rockies. Blight County, Idaho, is more than a little off the beaten track, which is exactly the way its idiosyncratic residents like it. As a rule, the only killing Sheriff Bo Tully needs to deal with is the occasional bar brawl turned ugly. So when a dead man clad in a designer pinstriped suit and just one shiny black dress shoe is found draped over a pasture fence near the little town of Famine, the sanguine, watercolor-painting lawman knows the place soon will be abuzz with speculation and rumor. With its understated wackiness and bull's-eye humor, The Blight Way is vintage McManus in new garb. As he blends his patented brand of wry observation with the venerable traditions of the crime procedural, this master storyteller once again affirms the New York Times Book Review's dictum that "everybody should read Patrick McManus."
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The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems
By Sherman Alexie '94
Kirkus Reviews: A terrific second novel by the talented young Native American author whose highly praised fiction (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1993; Reservation Blues, 1995) has already moved him on to the short list of the country's best young writers. . . . It's a rich, panoramic portrayal of contemporary Seattle that uses the form of the mystery to tell some uncomfortable home truths about Indian-white relations, and indeed racism in all its forms. . . . Both a splendidly constructed and wonderfully readable thriller—and a haunting, challenging articulation of the plight and the pride of contemporary Native Americans.
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The Game of Hearts
Suzanne D. Lonn '68
Adoptions pose questions, often avoided or unanswered, but when little Katie was given and then adopted in the 1940's, the folks of the tightly-knit farming community of Wheatland were in shock.
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The Goal
By Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Recommended by Pamela Henderson, business and marketing professor. A novel about a plant manager whose business is failing and whose marriage is falling apart. His efforts to make the plant profitable and bring the workers on board illustrate state-of-the-art management principles.
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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
By Sherman Alexie '94
From the publisher: A highly acclaimed collection of short stories by a young Native American writer hailed by the New York Times as "one of the major lyric voices of our time." Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves characters, themes, and language as he evokes the complex density of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, an existence filled with pain, anger, and bitterness but also, more importantly, with forgiveness and resilient hope.
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The Plot Against America
By Phillip Roth
Recommended by Leonard Orr, English, critical theory professor. A startlingly alternative version of American history, imagining the country with Charles Lindbergh as president and the U.S. forces not joining the Allies in World War II. The book is frightening and breathtaking.
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The Sea Butterfly
By Expedito A. Ibarbia '67
An adventure-romance thriller in which a Yankee clipper ship captain in a troubled marriage to a shipping tycoon's daughter commandeers his ship and crew in Boston, takes them to San Francisco hiding a fugitive half-brother officer on board, battles pursuing captains, then flees to the Orient to rekindle his lost love for a chieftain's daughter.
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The Star Sailors
By Gary L. Bennett '70
Throughout the history of the human race there have been adventurers who must test the limits of exploration, iconoclasts who will never be satisfied with peace at the expense of ignorance. And ignorance will be dangerous indeed if it is true that the Apollyoni exist. In a Galactic Federation without war, it has been hard to imagine evil, until the expedition to Ahriman ended in such horrible violence that its lone survivor—Coni Sanderson—had to be almost completely reconstructed. For Coni's sake, Greg Sheldon wants more than anything to go beyond the perimeter to search out the truth. Richard Highstreet's father was lost on one of the last major expeditions and he, too, would travel anywhere to find out why. Outstanding courage has made Ben Wilson their commander on a desperate and illegal mission through metaspace, and he knows that if Art Cooke, the fourth crewmember of the Odyssey, knew the real reason for the voyage, he would have stopped it. It will be Ben's job to keep them from destroying each other before they reach their destination, because when that destination is reached, they may have more destruction on their hands than any of them could ever have imagined possible.
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The Toughest Indian in the World
By Sherman Alexie '94
From the publisher: In these stories we meet the kind of American Indians we rarely see in literature—the upper and middle class, the professionals and white-collar workers, the bureaucrats and poets, falling in and out of love and wondering if they will make their way home. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to return from the hospital, listening to his father's friends argue about Jesus' carpentry skills as they build a wheelchair ramp. An estranged interracial couple, separated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with $42 and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy. Sherman Alexie's is a voice of remarkable passion, and these stories are love stories—between parents and children, white people and Indians, movie stars and ordinary people. Witty, tender, and fierce, The Toughest Indian in the World is a virtuoso performance by one of the country's finest writers.
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The Work of Wolves
By Kent Meyers '80
From the publisher: Even at the tender age of fourteen, Carson Fielding possessed a preternatural gift for communicating with horses, as well as for sizing up the people he meets in his South Dakota reservation border town. So when Carson buys his first horse—a run-down, wild-eyed roan—from wealthy rancher Magnus Yarborough, he quickly develops an instinctive dislike for the man and his rough manner with people and animals. Years later, Carson, now a skilled and respected horseman, is called upon to train Magnus's herd and teach his wife to ride. The spirited Rebecca has a natural aptitude for the world of horses, and, as her lessons progress, she and Carson develop a deep connection that angers the cruel rancher and sets off a violent chain of events. Thrown into the drama are Earl Walks Alone, a young Lakota man trying to study his way off the reservation and into college, and Willi Schubert, a German exchange student confronting his family's troubled history. Though unlike in background, the characters mirror one another as they struggle with similar issues of love, cruelty, family, and history in a world where connections to the past and to the land speak powerfully about a person's very identity.y.
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Two Worlds
By Marietta Barron
The account of a pre-teen Mexican-American boy who challenged the system of school segregation in the California mining town where he and his family lived.
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Windfalls
By Jean Hegland '79
From the publisher: Windfalls is a passionate story of motherhood—both tender and tough—that takes an unflinching look at the many choices facing every woman. Young and pregnant, Cerise and Anna make very different decisions about their lives. While teenage Cerise struggles to support herself and her young daughter, Anna finishes college, marries, and later gives birth to two daughters of her own. After the birth of her second child, a tragic accident tears Cerise's life apart, and she loses her already tenuous position in society. As Windfalls progresses, Cerise and Anna seem destined to approach each other, their stories dramatically interwoven. When finally their lives intersect, each woman emerges stronger, inspired by what she sees in the other, changed by what she learns.
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