The Western genre is ripe for imagination, with blazing of new frontiers, commitment to authenticity, and opportunities for independence. Check out these titles that reimagine the possibilities of the genre! Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed. (Created August 2023)
Daughter of Fortune
The story of a young woman's quest for love and fortune during the California Gold Rush in San Francisco.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View Daughter of FortuneDays Without End
Entering the U.S. army after fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland, seventeen-year-old Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, experience the harrowing realities of the Indian wars and the American Civil War between the Wyoming plains and Tennessee. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View Days Without EndKaren Memory
A tale set in late nineteenth century steampunk Seattle finds orphaned Karen working in a high-quality bordello, where she confronts a powerful man who owns a dangerous mind-control machine.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View Karen MemoryThe Best Bad Things
A period novel about a female detective who goes undercover (occasionally as a man), to infiltrate a smuggling ring, and navigates shifting allegiances once on the inside.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View The Best Bad ThingsFrontier
In the distant future most of the human race has fled a ravaged Earth to find new life on other planets. For those who stayed a lawless society remains. Then a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet's first visitor in three hundred years.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View FrontierThe Good Luck Girls
Sold as children and branded with cursed markings, five girls trapped in a brutal existence risk a dangerous escape and a harrowing journey to find freedom, justice and revenge in a country of human and inhuman forces that would deny them basic freedoms.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View The Good Luck GirlsIn the Distance
After a young Swedish boy finds himself alone in California, he travels east to find his brother, having a series of adventures and encountering naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, and lawmen along the way.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View In the DistanceWounded
Explores issues of masculinity and homosexuality against a Western American backdrop, charting the effects of a fatal gay bashing incident on the lives of a father and son living in Wyoming.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View WoundedBook of the Little Axe
Quietly but purposefully rebelling against the life others expect of her in late-18th-century Trinidad, Rosa loses her family's farm when her homeland transitions to British rule, before her half-Crow son finds his coming-of-age challenged by decades-old secrets.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Book of the Little AxeUpright Women Wanted
The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Upright Women Wanted