Lost Man's River - Hardcover

"Intricately structured, richly documented, utterly convincing . . . certain to linger in the memory like an experience we have lived through but cannot, for all our effort at analysis, comprehend."
-Joyce Carol Oates, The Washington Post Book World

"A novel of high ambition and high achievement. . . . Like Twain and Faulkner, Matthiessen has mastered the knack of achieving a literary effect without viola-ting the authenticity of an unlettered voice."
-Cleveland Plain Dealer

"This novel is Matthiessen at his best-a masterfully spun yarn, a little otherworldly, a dreamlike momentum. . . . Like everything of his, it's also a deep dec-laration of love for the planet."
-Thomas Pynchon

"The most beautiful and compelling American novel in decades."
-Chicago Sun-Times

"An original and powerful artist . . . who has produced as impressive a body of work as that of any writer of our time. . . . He has immeasurably enlarged our consciousness."
-William Styron

"One of our best writers."
-Don DeLillo

"When all the faddish smoke clears, Peter Matthiessen's work will stand revealed as that of an artist of immense talent, grandeur, and genius."
-Jim Harrison

"One of our few genuine masters."
-Thomas McGuane

"The best of the North American capacity for risk, self-knowledge, and the transformation of experience into destiny is to be found in the work of Peter Matthiessen."
-Carlos Fuentes

essen is one of the few American writers ever nominated for the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction.

When his novel Killing Mister Watson was published in 1990, the reviews were extraordinary. It was heralded as "a marvel of invention . . . a virtuoso performance" (The New York Times Book Review) and a "novel [that] stands with the best that our nation has produced as literature" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now Peter Matthiessen brings us the second novel in his Watson trilogy, a project that has been nearly twenty years in the writing. A story of epic scope and ambition, Lost Man's River confronts the primal relationship between a dangerous father and his desperate sons and the ways in which his death has shaped their lives.

Lucius Watson is obsessed with learning the truth about his father. Who was E. J. Watson? Was he a devoted family man, an inspired farmer, a man of progress an