Angle of Repose

Summary

A retired, wheelchair-bound historian sifts through the letters and papers of his pioneer grandparents, reconstructing their lives as they followed mining work across the nineteenth-century American West. The novel braids the present-day narrator's own marital wreckage with the slow erosion of his grandmother's genteel expectations, using the archive as a lens on memory, marriage, and frontier myth. It stands as a defining work of literary regionalism and of the American historical novel.