March 21, 2023, 7PM at Back of Beyond Books: Author reading and signing with Shelley Read and her debut novel — Go as a River

March 21, 2023 7:00 PM

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado—the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses.

Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. She flees into the surrounding mountains where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring.

Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the town of Iola in the 1960s, Go as a River is a story of deeply held love in the face of hardship and loss, but also of finding courage, resilience, friendship, and, finally, home—where least expected. This stunning debut explores what it means to lead your life as if it were a river—gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when a river is dammed.

Buy Go as a River

Shelley Read is a fifth-generation Coloradoan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope. She was a Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and Honors, and was a founder of the Environment & Sustainability major and a support program for first-generation and at-risk students. Shelley holds degrees in writing and literary studies from the University of Denver and Temple University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is a regular contributor to Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal, and has written for the Denver Post and a variety of publications.

December newsletter just dropped! Have you read it? It's in our bio!

(If the answer is no and the reason the answer is no is that you aren't subscribed to the newsletter, then now's the time! Head over to www.backofbeyondbooks.com to get that all squared away.)

#BackofBeyond #BackofBeyondBooks #moab #eatsleepreadlocal #moabutah
Staff Pick day!! Today, a book that's been flying off the shelves and sticking to the top of the Indie Bestsellers list - David Grann's "The Wager," reviewed by our equally popular staff member, Matthew! 

"The Wager"
By David Grann

"Joan Didion said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." In the 1740s, this was the task of the last survivors of the Wager. Facing a hanging, these men had to tell a wild story in order to live. The Wager had been sent on a secret mission to capture Spanish treasure. But after a series of storms in Cape Horn, the ship went missing. Then, some of its crew washed up on the coast of Brazil. Six months later, three other crew members washed up in Chile. Each group told of cannibalism and mutiny. But all of the survivors were also an inconvenience in the British government's official narrative of its own navy. Here David Grann has the warp, woof, and weave of stories within stories, and about our very needs for stories. It's got the salt of high seas adventure, the desperate horror of survival, the mystery of unreliable narrators, the tension of a courtroom thriller, and the dark heart of an empire writing its story."

- Matthew

#BackofBeyond #BackofBeyondBooks #BobbStaffPick #StaffPicks #eatsleepreadlocal #moab #moabutah