Not since the publication of his own beloved classic Lonesome Dove has there been a novel like this one, another big, brilliant, unputdownable saga of the West from Larry McMurtry.  Telegraph Days is at once a major work of literature and a completely absorbing read; not just great fiction, but fiction on a great scale, encompassing many years, many characters, real and fictional, and the whole vast landscape of place, time, life, and heart, which has served for more than 130 years as the background for "the Western" in fiction and on the screen.  Nobody writes, or has ever written, better about the West than Larry McMurtry, and nobody has caught better in words its myths, its often brutal reality, its overwhelming size, and the way it captured both the imagination and the hopes of those who settled there, only, as was so often the case, to dash those hopes.

Told in the voice of Nellie Courtright, a spunky, courageous, attractive young woman whose story this is in part, Telegraph Days is the big novel of the Western gunfighters that people have been hoping for years Larry McMurtry would write.


Larry McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas.  His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment
(1975), which were adapted in [...] McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations (13 wins). [...]