Annie Proulx — Postcards

Flamingo 1994 Paperback, 352pp. 'Postcards' is the story of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime on the run from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for 40 years. Denied love and unable to settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, trapping, prospecting for uranium and ranching. His only contact with his past it through a series of postcards he sends home, not realising that in his absence disaster has befallen his family, and their deep-rooted connection with the land has been severed with devastating consequences . (ISBN: 9780006546689). Good.