Matt Pavelich

Our Savage

A Novel

In 1865 a baby--too large a baby to pass through anyone's hips--is born to a couple at the crumbling edge of Europe where the horror of pending war is already in the air. By any measure too large, our hero can develop no patience for his determined, dinky fellows, and so from the Balkan backwater of his birth and his youth as a precocious highwayman, to intrigues at court in Vienna, the problem remains the same--he is by one means and another continually wearing out his welcome.

In this bawdy first novel by Matt Pavelich, Danny Savage migrates to the New World in 1899, where he finally settles an empty, rough corner of Wyoming with his epic shrew of a wife, Stoja. In Savage's wake are spent empires, ruptured families, collateral lives that have touched and fallen away.

Not since Ken Kesey burst on the scene with Sometimes a Great Notion has the West produced such an exciting and accomplished new novelist. Matt Pavelich has given us a giant's coat tails to ride upon, let us wear for a while his seven-league boots.

The Other Shoe

A Novel

Henry Brusett is the only one who can explain the mysterious death of Calvin Teague. He's the only one who truly knows how the young man came to be bloodied and lifeless on his land in Montana's vast backcountry. But Henry won't say anything. His silence and its ripple across his small community form the heart of Matt Pavelich's engrossing second novel, The Other Shoe.

Henry never wanted much more than a family and his days spent as a sawyer deep in the wilderness. But by middle–age Henry is divorced, disabled, and isolated on a remote plot of land in Montana. After years of self–imposed loneliness, Henry meets Karen, who's half his age and knows nothing but her own willful solitude. Their union is the unlikeliest of bonds, a mix of comfort and guilt for Henry who believes he's too old for Karen. But it's also the spark of his undoing, a decision that leads him toward one of his greatest regrets.

As members of Henry and Karen's small town try to both uncover and cover–up the truth surrounding Calvin Teague's untimely death, The Other Shoe moves toward the inescapable and shines in the rarity of Pavelich's assured and haunting style.