West of Loveland
On sale
18th February 2027
Price: £20
‘An overlooked giant of American comic fiction’
GUARDIAN
‘The greatest writer you’ve never heard of’
INDEPENDENT
‘I envy the readers who will be reading Drury for the first time . . . a memorable novel that will make the world a less lonely and more mysterious place’
Yiyun Li, author of THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW
‘I adore Tom Drury’s work and West of Loveland is another triumph, another knockout . . . a great, great book’
John Patrick McHugh, author of FUN AND GAMES
Grouse County, somewhere in the Midwest. Returning home from a disappointing pheasant hunt, teenage Rocky and his aunt Helen discover a gun by the side of the road. Sheriff Dan Norman is quickly on the case, but his investigation soon sets off a mysterious chain of events, unearthing secrets at the heart of the rural community.
As the citizens of Grouse County assemble in a quest for the truth, their lives intersect in other ways, too: old feuds, new romances, occasional shared dinners with a decent bottle of wine. And by the time the fateful history of the roadside gun is revealed, Dan Norman has problems of his own to contend with at home.
Steeped in the strangeness and wonder of everyday life, West of Loveland is a remarkable exploration of the intricate bonds of family and community, and a defiant homage to human goodness.
PRAISE FOR TOM DRURY
‘A big-time American talent’
Jonathan Franzen, author of CROSSROADS
‘A major figure in American literature’
NEW YORK TIMES
‘A truly great writer‘
ESQUIRE
GUARDIAN
‘The greatest writer you’ve never heard of’
INDEPENDENT
‘I envy the readers who will be reading Drury for the first time . . . a memorable novel that will make the world a less lonely and more mysterious place’
Yiyun Li, author of THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW
‘I adore Tom Drury’s work and West of Loveland is another triumph, another knockout . . . a great, great book’
John Patrick McHugh, author of FUN AND GAMES
Grouse County, somewhere in the Midwest. Returning home from a disappointing pheasant hunt, teenage Rocky and his aunt Helen discover a gun by the side of the road. Sheriff Dan Norman is quickly on the case, but his investigation soon sets off a mysterious chain of events, unearthing secrets at the heart of the rural community.
As the citizens of Grouse County assemble in a quest for the truth, their lives intersect in other ways, too: old feuds, new romances, occasional shared dinners with a decent bottle of wine. And by the time the fateful history of the roadside gun is revealed, Dan Norman has problems of his own to contend with at home.
Steeped in the strangeness and wonder of everyday life, West of Loveland is a remarkable exploration of the intricate bonds of family and community, and a defiant homage to human goodness.
PRAISE FOR TOM DRURY
‘A big-time American talent’
Jonathan Franzen, author of CROSSROADS
‘A major figure in American literature’
NEW YORK TIMES
‘A truly great writer‘
ESQUIRE
Reviews
He does so much with such gentle concision and leaves his characters and the stories they are enmeshed in open to interpretation in a way few writers have the nerve to do
A writer who can go from laughter to darkness in an instant . . . an overlooked giant of American comic fiction
You will want to read everything else Drury has ever written
His anonymity is a literary tragedy. When read today, The End of Vandalism convinces, with meandering, deadpan humility, as one of the past half-century's finest novels
Astonishing . . . to be associated with something this good would be an honour for any writer
A truly great writer
Drury lands line after line of laconic idiom with the artlessness of true art
Tom Drury makes beautiful novels. West of Loveland is funny and heartbreaking, expansive and focused, episodic and cumulative, gorgeous and understated. The novel is profoundly American in its rhythms, its setting and its characters
I envy the readers who will be reading a Drury novel for the first time, and I rejoice with other readers who, like me, are long-time admirers of his work. With a wry humour, an insatiable thirst for storytelling, and a keen recognition of the beautiful strangeness in everyday life, Drury has delivered in West of Loveland a memorable novel that will make the world a less lonely and more mysterious place.
Drury's world is so far from where we are that it seems to glow across the sky at intervals like a lunar heartbeat. Yet West of Loveland, a new and most welcome Grouse County novel, is also a strangely familiar return to the state of loss we thought to remedy. "This place is dying for voices" he tells us, and Tom Drury's voice is like no one else's. It was Chekov who insisted that a gun appearing in the first act must go off by the third, and it might occur to readers that Drury is a version of a future-tense, midwestern Chekov who nevertheless insists that all good, bright lives are shot through with a saving depth of darkness
I adore Tom Drury's work, his world, his characters, his uncanny and rich way of seeing and talking, and West of Loveland is another triumph, another knockout. A mysterious, hilarious, moving, beguiling and beautiful novel that speaks to now, that speaks to then, that shouts far ahead of us. It brought me back to the purest pleasure of reading, that innocent childish joy and delight and fullness that comes from encountering a great, great book. Drury is a true master.
Drury's greatest strength remains his extraordinary sympathy for human frailty. His prose is deceptively understated, his dialogue effortlessly natural, and his humor gently woven into moments of genuine poignancy. The novel's measured pacing and cumulative power yield a deeply humane meditation on fate, belonging, and the unseen threads that connect seemingly ordinary lives
A new Tom Drury novel calls for celebration among anyone who loves extremely funny, arrestingly beautiful novels (and if that's not you, why?)
I've been visiting Grouse County for a few years now, watching the characters age forwards and backwards, grow in tentative and strange directions. I'm as bewildered and thrilled by his achievement as his characters are by their existences - as, I suppose, we all are. Drury's prose always has a cleanness shot through with light, one that's all the more precious for an awareness of the "amazing darkness" that surrounds it, but in West of Loveland the cardiac steadiness of his sentences attain a quietly epiphanic force that I find myself in turn forced to call mystical. The needle-drops, sumptuous food textures, and those ordinary ways that real-life people have of being funny: all of those things are here, as usual. But what's new is a slow, devastating buildup of the novel's pace towards an ending that will leave you - like Louise, one of his richest creations - "crying about time itself".
West of Loveland is graceful and assured from the very first lines of its telling. In this historical moment, when there are plenty of reasons to succumb to utter pessimism about America, Tom Drury has fashioned a story full of American warmth, humour, depth, and compassion, a story that inspires faith that such moments shall pass and that better things will manage to endure. Readers will be delighted by this return to Grouse County and reminded that there are wonders right where we stand
Tom Drury's characters are as wry and wise and reckless, as down to earth and curiously sensitive to the disguised grace of things as his writing. There is an endless magic to his novels, West of Loveland included, that makes you want to begin his books again the moment you finish them. He is in a league of his own.
I loved this book so much. Tom Drury's rural America has a dreamlike, Lynchian quality. It is a place I would very much like to live. This book is an endlessly funny and charming exploration of the twists and turns of love in midlife, and of various eccentric characters finding their way in the world. Drury's female characters are wonderfully singular and real. The whole book has an electric energy which is totally its own. A brilliant book.
Tom Drury is a national treasure, and this is a masterpiece. No other writer has his eye for detail, his ear for dialogue, his tenderness, his humor, his attunement to the numinous and to community, his calm mesmerizing command of the cadences of plain description. 'West of Loveland' refers, in the novel, to the siren song of a second-hand postcard: inscribed with someone else's memories, someone else's story, the place beckons to various characters - 'We have to go' because the fiction of it feels realer than their real lives. Every page of this book is as deep a dream as that postcard. West of Loveland, put simply, is west of Loveland: to read Tom Drury is to have to go to Grouse County
[A] deadpan-funny, whip-smart praise song to Midwestern flint . . . in 2026 any narrative built around empathy and community feels dubious, potentially spoiled by nostalgia or wishful thinking. The miracle here is how successfully Drury carries off the dominant tone of celebration . . . the sweetness on display here isn't easy or one-note. It's the painstaking product of effort, of attentiveness, of empathy - of a dogged devotion to living, matter-of-factly, in the moment. And of doing all those things alongside others. A fond, brilliant farewell to Drury's slice of the uncanny Midwest
Drury is a big-time American talent
Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and splashing upon the curtain all the colour of their fancies. And then there are the writers who raise the veil and lead us to see for the first time. Tom Drury belongs to the latter, and is a rare master at the art of seeing.
A major figure in American literature, author of a string of novels without a dud in the bunch . . . Drury gives us the wondrous and engaging stuff of real storytelling