The Fire Flower

John Sheldon rides into the unmapped wilderness of the Sasnokee-keewan with nothing but a horse, a pack, and the wreckage of his past behind him. Betrayed and brokenhearted, he chooses the only path that feels like freedom: deeper into the wild, where no one knows his name and the only judgments come from weather and terrain. When he realizes he's lost, his trail has taken him somewhere wrong, he faces the first test of his exile. Turn back, and perhaps salvage the journey. Or press forward into the unknown, his own man at last, with infinite time stretching ahead. He chooses to continue forward. What follows is part meditation on solitude, part survival narrative, part confrontation with the ghosts of those who came before him in this brutal, beautiful country. This is early 20th-century Western fiction at its finest: unsentimental, atmospheric, and deeply concerned with what it means to remake oneself in the spaces civilization hasn't touched. Gregory writes with the authority of someone who knows this land intimately. For readers who love frontier literature, tales of self-imposed exile, and the quiet heroism of simply putting one foot in front of the other.