The Passings
From the award-winning author of Mad Boy, a richly atmospheric historical Western about a notorious riverman seeking a new life amid the violence and dark promise of the American frontier
In the summer of 1834, the sky over an Ohioan river town darkens--not with storm clouds, but with the thunderous wings of an immense flock of passenger pigeons. Their arrival, known as a passing, is an omen, and for the infamous Henry Phipps it means that a reckoning is near.
A legendary riverman with a violent past and a name whispered along the banks of the Mississippi and Ohio, Henry Phipps is a man caught between myth and memory. A feared and admired figure by many, Henry is seeking to change his life and to shuck off his reputation--unearned, as he sees it. But with a fortune sewn into his saddlebags that is coveted by a gang of demonic children, a vengeful family on his trail, and a town in moral freefall, Henry finds himself at the center of a violent storm.
As Henry searches for an exit strategy, he is drawn back into the lives of those who know him best, including Annette Barney, a sharp, independent woman who, with grit and grace, has made a life for herself in town.
Set against a vividly drawn early American landscape on the cusp of great change, The Passings is a tale of fleeting fortunes, haunted pasts, and lives carved out along the nation's most mythic waterways. Rich in atmosphere, funny, peopled by a large cast of indelible characters, Arvin's novel is also a treatise on the price of legend--and the quiet, human truths that endure.
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