East of the Mountains (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

"A compassionate and masterful achievement." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A strikingly joyful book and a monumental achievement." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"The writing is wonderful throughout, the characters are vivid...heartfelt, engaging and well drawn." --The Miami Herald

"Profound and ambitious. . . . Guterson depicts . . . moral and spiritual struggle with a clear-eyed intensity and intelligence that gives East of the Mountains its essential authority." --Chicago Tribune

"The shape is elegant, the tone is perfectly controlled, almost cool, and Guterson's prose shines with [a] taut polish. . . .[He] is a craftsman with a sense of literary history, one of the most serious and accomplished young American writers." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Guterson possesses a remarkable gift for capturing people and places, etching them into the reader's mind." -USA Today

"Elegiac . . . like his first novel, Guterson's sophomore outing is a serious and surprising book. . . . A monumental achievement." -The Philadelphia Inquirer

"In describing the world of a dying man, Guterson invokes the ultimate book of suffering-then, to his great credit, offers it here as a consolation rather than despair." -The Boston Sunday Globe

"This book would be a challenge to praise too highly. It resounds with clarity. It feels like home." -The San Diego Union-Tribune

"[Guterson] has produced a clean, unpretentious and expert piece of work, filled with the immediate beauty of everyday life and the desolation of leaving it behind." -The Washington Times

"Wonderfully written, tender toward its characters, and full of incident and insight." -Men's Journal

In a novel of personal discovery set against the backdrop of the Columbia Basin of central Washington, retired heart surgeon Ben Givens, suffering from terminal colon cancer, embarks on one final hunting odyssey through the American West. By the author of Snow Falling on Cedars. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.