Books by Larry McMurtry

It begins in the office of The Hat Creek Cattle Company of the Rio Grande.It ends as a journey into the heart of every adventurer who ever lived . . .From the author of The Last Picture Show and Texasville - here is Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece. A powerful, triumphant portrayal of the American West as it really was.More than a love story, more than an adventure, Lonesome Dove is an epic: a monumental novel which embraces the spirit of the last defiant wilderness of America.Legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers - Lonesome Dove is the central, enduring American experience dramatically recreated in a magnificent story of heroism and love; of honour, loyalty and betrayal.

In this acclaimed novel that inspired the Academy Award-winning film, Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry created two unforgettable characters who won the hearts of readers and film-goers everywhere: Aurora Greenway and her daughter, Emma.Aurora is the kind of woman who makes the whole world orbit around her, including a string of devoted suitors. Widowed and overprotective of her daughter, Aurora adapts at her own pace until life sends two enormous challenges her way: Emma's hasty marrriage and subsequent battle with cancer. Terms of Endearment is the story of an unforgettable mother and her feisty daughter and their struggle to find the courage and humour to live through life's hazards - and to love each other as never before.

Bittersweet, funny and touching, The Desert Rose is the story of Harmony, a Las Vegas showgirl. At night she's a lead dancer in a gambling casino; during the day she raises peacocks. She's one of a dying breed of dancers, faced with fewer and fewer jobs and an even bleaker future. Yet she maintains a calm cheerfulness in that arid neon landscape of supermarkets, drive-in wedding chapels, and all-night casinos. While Harmony's star is fading, her beautiful, cynical daughter Pepper's is on the rise. But Harmony remains wistful and optimistic through it all. She is the unexpected blossom in the wasteland, the tough and tender desert rose.

Danny Deck is on the verge of success as an author, when he flees Houston and hurtles unexpectedly into the hearts of three women: a girlfriend who makes him happy but who won't stay; a neighbour as generous as she is lusty; and his pal, Emma Horton. Ranging from Texas to California on a young writer's journey in a car he calls El Chevy, Danny embarks on a wild ride towards literary fame and an unchartered border country. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is one of Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry's most vital and entertaining novels, a wonderful display of his ability to recreate the subtle textures of feelings, the claims of passing time and familiar places, and the rich interlocking swirl of people's lives.

Captain Woodrow Call, Gus McCrae's old partner, once a youthful Texas Ranger, is now a bounty hunter hired to track down a brutal young Mexican bandit. Riding with Call are an Eastern city slicker, a witless deputy, and one of the last members of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye Parker, now married to Lorena - once Gus's sweetheart. Their long, perilous chase leads them across the last wild stretches of the West into a hellhole known as Crow Town and, finally, deep into the vast, relentless plains of the Texas frontier.The final novel in the Lonesome Dove quartet, Streets of Laredo is an exhilarating, elegiac and achingly poignant tale of heroism and friendship.

On the wild Texas frontier where barbarism and civilization come in many forms, Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call are pitched into the long, bitter, bloody fighting under the command of Captain Inish Scull. When Scull's favourite horse is stolen by the Comanches, he decides to track him down, leaving Gus and Call in charge. However, on their return to Austin, Gus is greeted by the news that his sweetheart is to marry another man and Call finds that the town's most notorious woman is desperate to settle down with him and become respectable. When Scull's wealthy wife demands that her errant husband be brought home, with feelings akin to relief the two men set off once more into the vast, untamed plains . . .Comanche Moon, which follows on from Dead Man's Walk and prequels Lonesome Dove, follows Gus and Call in their bitter struggle to protect the advancing West frontier against the defiant Comanches, courageously determined to defend their territory and their way of life, and showcases McMurtry's strong affinity for the landscape and its inhabitants with a deeply felt lyrical intensity.

The triumphant return of Larry McMurtry with this ballad in prose: his heartfelt tribute to a bygone era of the American West.Larry McMurtry has done more than any other living writer to shape our literary imagination of the American West. With The Last Kind Words Saloon, he returns to the vivid and unsparing portrait of the nineteenth-century and cowboy lifestyle made so memorable in his classic Lonesome Dove. Evoking the greatest characters and legends of the Old Wild West, McMurtry tells the story of the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Long Grass, Texas. Once hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge - more often with a mean look than a pistol - the taciturn Wyatt now idles away his time between bottles, while the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc is more adept at poker than extracting teeth. With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of the Great Plains enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears.McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of the heroic pair from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, culminating with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in McMurtry's stark and peerless prose. As harsh and beautiful, and as brutal and captivating as the open range it depicts, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of the most original American writers.

Sam the Lion runs the pool-hall, the picture house and the all-night caf . Coach Popper whips his boys with towels and once took a shot at one when he disturbed his hunting. Billy wouldn't know better than to sweep his broom all the way to the town limits if no one stopped him. And teenage friends Sonny and Duane have nothing better to do than drift towards the adult world, with its temptations of sex and confusions of love.The basis for a classic film, The Last Picture Show is both extremely funny and deeply profound. And, with the eccentrically peopled Thalia, Texas, Larry McMurtry made a small town that feels as real as any you've ever walked around.Famously filmed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971 with Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd.With a new introduction by Mary Karr.