Ridgerunner

Ridgerunner

Gil Adamson

#4575 of 8,085 books · #693 in Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize (2020).

November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son's future. Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton, born in the woods to two outlaws, now finds himself semi-orphaned and left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun of the Anglican Order of Saint Mara. In the town of Banff, Alberta, where tourists, new immigrants, and POWs dwell among the locals, she lays claim to the boy and keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old home. The boy longs to return to his family's cabin, deep in the Sawback Range. His father is coming for him. The nun won't let him go. Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, this is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world.