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Butcher's Crossing

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Butcher's Crossing

By: John Williams
Narrated by: Anthony Heald
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Brought to you by Penguin.

BY THE AUTHOR OF STONER

Will Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living.

In a small town called Butcher's Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.

©2023 John Williams (P)2023 Penguin Audio

 Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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Critic reviews

His Stoner is the book that has garnered the attention, but I prefer this earlier take on the Western genre…it has some gory, visceral passages that are not for the faint-hearted (Kate Atkinson)
Shorn of sentimentality or decoration, the events and places [Williams] describes begin to feel inescapable, permanent, and rivetingly dramatic. This is language that seems to be carved into stone – into mountains... Stoner showed us a writer who had written a great book. To those of us who didn't know already, Butcher's Crossing reveals John Williams to be more than that: forgotten writer as he was, he was unquestionably also a great one (Archie Bland)
Superbly understated (Rosemary Goring)
One of the finest books about the elusive nature of the West ever written… It’s a graceful and brutal story of isolated men gone haywire
Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher’s Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy
Butcher's Crossing is like a western by Joseph Conrad...wonderful...beautifully written (David Nicholls)
This story about the hunt of one of the last great buffalo herds becomes a young man’s search for the integrity of his own being…The characters are defined, the events lively, the place, the smells, the sounds right. And the prose is superb
It is the novel's immense visual power and tangibility of material detail, its fully realized sense of time and place, its telling incidents, its nimble and subtle resonance with the Bible, and its fleshed-out characters, that make it a very great work
John Williams's unsparing novels express a highly qualified though resilient optimism about our ability to salvage something of value from life's impossible conditions. Along with the necessary isolation of the artist, he conveys the sobering if startled recognition--perhaps with his own career in mind--of the transitory triumph of art
Butcher’s Crossing is remarkable for the accuracy of Williams’s prose (John Sutherland)
All stars
Most relevant
Great story, brilliantly written, gripping and fascinating.
Narrator is excellent bringing alive every character and delivering pace and meaning - very good.

Superb

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A brutal but brilliant tale. Westerns are quite possibly my least read, and least enjoyed genre which makes this book all the more masterful because I loved it. A really fantastic example of men’s obsessions and complete disregard for nature. Hard to listen to at times (though I recon I could give skinning a buffalo a decent shot now) but beautifully described with fascinating characters.

A brutal but brilliant tale

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Beautifully performed and finely wrought. Well worth a listen. Didn’t know what to expect but so glad I gave it a go.

Vivid writing. Detailed narration.

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Sombre and moody tale of hunting in the west. Not quite as bleak as Cormack's writing but nearly as good.

Great mood and geipping story

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The post death renaissance of this author via the rediscovery of his novel ‘Stoner’ is not misguided, and the success of that book is no fluke.
Though completely different in terms of topic, style and tempo, this book is at least as compelling and certainly more action packed.
It is a juicy story of the real wild west, and a terrible truth which we should all be acquainted with. The decimation of wild bison on the American plains was so egregious, not merely because it almost led to the extinction of the best within a generation, and such a precipitous decline in numbers that it is hard to fathom, but that it was all about their hides alone. The hunters waste of the rest of the animal is beyond understanding and sickens to the core.
Lest anyone thinks it os something only Americans need contemplate, the hides were sought as belts for machinery in the US and across Europe fueling the Industrial Revolution, so we were all complicit.
That said, the story he tells is wild and exciting and dangerous and grubby and hard and brutal and wide and shocking, and I thoroughly enjoyed this insight into the shocking events that I refer to above. Twas ever thus and a stark reminder of the dangers of unfettered greed and its appalling consequences is timely.

Brutal, compelling, timely tale, well told.

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