Tehano — Allen Wier

"Allen Wier has imagined a way to express an epic vision of the American experiment at its crossroads. From the antebellum era, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wier's sizable cast of characters-African American freedmen and slaves, Native American warriors and their women, Confederate and Union veterans, immigrants, and citizens high and low-pitch up in Comanche territory in Texas, enacting their destinies. Wier has breathed new life into representative American men and women in a style alive with realism, soaring with lyricism, and vibrant with humor. His understanding of the Native American and the African American experience is stunningly uncanny."-David Madden

"An extraordinary accomplishment: a novel of Tolstoyan scope. Here is the palpable savage young country itself, and its people with all their loves, fears, passions, hopes, dreams, and sufferings-human souls searingly brought forth from the swirl of history. It is a great work of fictive Art, and to my mind perhaps the finest achievement of my generation, no less."-Richard Bausch

With vivid and authentic detail and a storm of narrative power, Allen Wier's Tehano brings together historical and imagined events, giving readers a sense of the final years of the nineteenth century-a time both brutal and majestic-that spawned our present time. The disparate narrative skeins are collected through the efforts of Gideon Jones, a westering picaro who sets down his adventures and those of the people whose path his crosses.