eBranch Blog

June 12, 2008

Spur Award Winners Announced

The Spur Awards are given annually by the Western Writers of America in a variety of categories. Winners are announced during the awards banquet at the annual Western Writers of America Convention. The following are highlights from the 2008 winners:

Best Western Long Novel
Aryn Kyle. The God of Animals
When her older sister runs away to marry a rodeo cowboy, Alice Winston is left to bear the brunt of her family's troubles - a depressed, bedridden mother; a reticent, overworked father; and a run-down horse ranch. As the hottest summer in fifteen years unfolds and bills pile up, Alice is torn between dreams of escaping the loneliness of her duty-filled life and a longing to help her father mend their family and the ranch.

Best Western Short Novel
Sandra Dallas. Tallgrass
This is her town as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things.

Best First Novel
Thomas Maltman. The Night Birds
The summer of 1876 is a time of fear and uncertainty for young Asa Senger and his German immigration family. Vast clouds of locusts descend once more on the Great Plains, stripping the land bare. The James/Younger gang, a band of murderous thieves, is rumored to be riding north into the area. And all the while, Asa can sense lurking just under the surface of his daily life something appalling that his parents will never speak of.

Best Western Nonfiction Contemporary
Robert M. Utley. Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers
Based on unprecedented access to Ranger archives, this fast-paced narrative stretches from the days of the Mexican Revolution (where atrocities against Mexican Americans marked the nadir of Ranger history) to the Branch Davidian saga near Waco and the recent bloody standoff with "Republic of Texas" militia. Readers will find in these pages one hundred years of high adventure. Utley follows the Rangers as they pursue bank robbers, bootleggers, moonshiners, and "horsebackers" (smugglers who used mule trains to bring liquor across the border). We see these fearless lawmen taming oil boomtowns, springing the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, facing down angry lynch mobs, and tracking the "Phantom Killer" of Texarkana. Utley also highlights the gradual evolution of this celebrated force, revealing that while West Texas Rangers still occasionally ride the range on horseback and crack down on smugglers and rustlers, East Texas Rangers - who work mostly in big cities - now ride in high-powered cars and contend with kidnappers, forgers, and other urban criminals. But East or West, today's Rangers have become sophisticated professionals, backed by crime labs and forensic science.

Best Western Drama
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Jesse James was a fabled outlaw, a charismatic, spiritual, larger-than-life bad man whose bloody exploits captured the imagination and admiration of a nation hungry for antiheroes. Robert Ford was a young upstart torn between dedicated worship and murderous jealousy, the "dirty little coward" who coveted Jesse's legend. The powerful, strange, and unforgettable story of their interweaving paths and twin destinies that would collide in a rain of blood and betrayal-is a story of America in all her rough, conflicted glory and the myths that made her.

Please see past Spur Award winners for more great Western reads!