Angle of Repose

Summary

A retired historian who uses a wheelchair 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.