Kick Down A Novel Rebecca Clarren by Rebecca Clarren 9781628729672, 9781628729689, 1628729678, 1628729686 instant download after payment.

Shortlisted for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction

Named a “35 over 35” best debut book of 2018 

A Colorado med student must save her troubled sister & the family’s struggling cattle ranch in this “impressive debut novel” (Washington Post). 

When Jackie Dunbar's father dies, she takes a leave from medical school & goes back to the family cattle ranch in Colorado to set affairs in order. But what she finds derails her: The Dunbar ranch is bankrupt, her sister is having a nervous breakdown, & the oil & gas industry has changed the landscape of this small western town both literally & figuratively, tempting her to sell a gas lease to save the family land. There is fencing to be repaired & calves to be born, & no one—except Jackie herself—to take control. But then a gas well explodes in the neighboring ranch, & the fallout sets off a chain of events that will strain trust, sever old relationships, & ignite new ones. 

Rebecca Clarren's Kickdown is a tautly written debut novel about two sisters & the Iraq war veteran who steps in to help. It is a timeless & timely meditation on the grief wrought by death, war, & environmental destruction. Kickdown, like Kent Haruf's Plainsong or Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone, weaves together the threads of land, family, failure, & perseverance to create a gritty tale about rural America.

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Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the American West for more than twenty years. She is the winner of the 2021 Whiting Nonfiction Grant for her work on The Cost of Free Land. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, & ten grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, High Country News, The Nation, & Indian Country Today. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Sky Horse Press, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize.