Vintage Contemporaries / An Unfinished Life

pane low in the east wall for the benefit of the boy's dog, so Karl could lie on the porch and stare in at them.

When they were finished, Griffin took each man by a hand, standing between them, and bowed his head. "God bless this place," he said. He was serious, original, not just repeating something he'd heard.

"Is there anything else you need?" Mitch had asked.

The boy shaded his eyes, looking up at the man. "You could sit in here with us." Mitch's face shone even blacker in the sun, like wet obsidian. "Even though I'm no Viking?" He bent down over the boy. "Even though my great-granddad was an African man?"
"Does that mean no?" Griffin asked.

Mitch shoved him away playfully, the way men roughhouse with boys. "I guess I won't," he said. "I believe I've sweated enough in this life already."

Einar smiles at the clarity of the memory. He works his jaw, and his ears pop as if he were descending from a great height. The old dog fidgets on the porch, then settles its grayed jowls on its crossed forepaws and stares in through the little window. His name's Karl, but it's not the original Karl, just another dog taken from the town shelter, worked and fed and given a place to rest and grow lame. The first Karl lies buried behind the barn. Dead and buried like his son, Griffin, and his wife, Ella.

He straightens in the chair and wonders if the dog wishes it had a boy for company. Not his boy, just some other kid. He wonders what it is that dogs long for, or if they long. Maybe they just wait patiently for some improvement in their lives. He thinks he's a man who knows something of waiting, but the heat's gotten to him and he feels his stomach come up and shorten his breath. He cracks a window and sucks at the draft of night a

idiom and state that Mark Spragg has put his brand on realistic Western novels in our time." St. Louis Post-Dispatch
I can t get more than a few pages into a novel unless the prose is good. In Mark Spragg s An Unfinished Life the writing is of considerable grace and beauty, plus there s a compelling tale of the New West which at times is an uncomfortable page turner where you are standing on the sidelines rooting for your heartbreaking favorites. Jim Harrison"Spragg has the remarkable ability to establish voices that feel indelibly genuine and true, yet belong to characters as different from each other as a sensitive and adventurous pre-pubescent girl, two aging ranchers ravaged by different kinds of pain, a confused and self-protective young mother and a man with a hair-trigger anger and a dangerously twisted concept of love, entitlement and family." Santa Fe New Mexican"The tension lies in the interior life Spragg creates for his characters. They are believably raw and wounded. And, above all, redeemable." New York Daily News"Mark Spragg invents characters that are as richly drawn and lovingly rendered as the landscape in which he sets them down. An Unfinished Life is honest, engaged, deeply satisfying, and full of an uncanny grace that resides both in the beauty of the language and in these valuable lives." Pam Houston"An Unfinished Life has dysfunction and menace and clipped, big-sky dialogue that's as spare as Cormac McCarthy's work but with a warmer patina. The carefully placed story hides surprising flashes of humor inside telling detail." USA Today"Packed with descriptive detail that pays tribute to Wyoming's harsh splendor, An Unfinished Life shows the power of place to save us." The Boston Phoenix
"Mark Spragg's An Unfinished Life is a tremendously accomplished, elegantly written and paced tale of love and loss, the bonds of grief and blood, and the complex turnings of the human heart. This is a heartbreaking yet uplifting novel that is most deeply satisfying. These characters, these people, will remain with me a long, long time." Jeffrey Lent"One of those once-in-a-blue-moon type novels that takes convention and stands it on its head. . . . Filled with often poetic meditations about the love we hold for those who have died--what sort of role their memories play in our lives--and the importance of laying the past to rest while moving into the future." St. Petersburg Times "Masterly . . . Highly recommended."--Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal, starred review