Turpentine: A Novel

(Paperback)

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A comic glance at the old American West and a serious story about transformation and redemption, Turpentine is a bold, inventive novel about a young mans attempt to make sense of the past while unsteadily growing into adulthood. In 1871, Edward Turrentine Bayard III, sick and restless, leaves his Connecticut home to recover out west. But when the private sanitarium in which he is to stay proves to be nothing more than a rickety outpost on the Nebraskan plains, he becomes a buffalo skinner. After returning to the East, Ned teams up with Phaegin, who earns her money rolling cigars, and Curly, a fourteen-year-old coal miner, but the newfound trio is wrongly accused of triggering a bomb at a labor rally, and they must flee. With a Pinkerton agent following their every move, the gang of winsome neer-do-wells takes flight on a circuitous escape through northern outposts into Indian country, past the slums of Chicago, and into the boundless Great Plains. En route they become witness to the transformation and growing pains of a burgeoning nation. A picaresque novel of wonderful energy and unforgettable characters, Turpentine is a comic, prescient look at the growth of an individual and a country.

Reviews

"A novel of extraordinary wit and imagination, covering immense geographical, historical, and emotional ground. Full of twists and turns, verve and vinegar...A remarkable debut."
"Shades of Larry McMurtry, and even of Charles Dickens! Spring Warren's Turpentine is a joy of a read that just might, all by itself, mark the resurrection of the grand picaresque novel. A terrific book by a superb new voice in American letters!"
"Spring Warren delivers smart prose that calls to mind masters like Charles Portis, Dorothy M. Johnson, and Larry McMurtry but in a voice all her own. Turpentine sizzles with comic misadventures, the right balance of pathos, and a strong dose of humanity. A delightful, mesmerizing literary debut."
"Turpentine is a magnificent yam, sweeping and intimate, luminous and brutal, hilarious, rich, and wrenching. Ned Bayard is an American hero in the mold of Jack Crabbe and Ebenezer Cooke. Spring Warren has given us a galloping read and an epic to savor for the ages."
"With a pitch-perfect narrator and a smorgasbord of sensory detail, Spring Warren brings the Old West back to life. Turpentine casts the rebirth of a privileged young man finding self-truth against the birth of a nation struggling to come together, in a novel filled with wit, brilliant characterizations, and descriptions that will leave you feeling as if you can still feel the dust of a buffalo stampede settling around you."