Tehano
From the Dust Jacket
With vivid and authentic details and a storm of narrative power, Allen Wier’s Tehano brings together historical and imagined events, giving readers a sense of the final years of the nineteenth century—a time both brutal and majestic—that spawned our present time. The disparate narrative skeins are collected through the efforts of Gideon Jones, a westering picaro who sets down his adventures and those of the people whose path his crosses.
Praise for Tehano
“This is a novel that sticks. It has the smell of lived life, the rattle of a world long gone. It rouses and compels, not least because Wier has a true yarn, outsize and grand, to tell. His is an American West fetched up whole and mythic, more dust and wind and high sky and idiom per page than anything this side of Larry McMurtry.” — Lee K. Abbott
“Tehano is sweetly antiquarian and hip at the same time. I lived it and loved it. Many Comanche and Texan hats off to Allen Wier.” — Barry Hannah
“Allen Wier has imagined a way to express an epic vision of the American experiment at its crossroads. From the antebellum era, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, African American freedmen and slaves, Native American warriors and their women, Confederate and Union veterans, immigrants, and citizens high and low who pitch up in Comanche territory in Texas. Wier breathes new life into representative American men and women in a style alive with realism, soaring with lyricism, and vibrant with humor. His understanding of the Native American and the African American experience is stunningly uncanny.” — David Madden
"An extraordinary accomplishment: a novel of Tolstoyan scope. Here is the palpable savage young country itself, and its people with all their loves, fears, passions, hopes, dreams and sufferings—human souls searingly brought forth from the swirl of history. It is a great work of fictive Art, and to my mind perhaps the finest achievement of my generation, no less." — Richard Bausch
"Tehano is a rich, ambitious, satisfying novel—a long read but a good one." — Larry McMurtry
“A wonderful Texas novel. A genuine masterpiece. A magnificent work.” — George Garrett
“Tehano is amazing—like some blessed combination of Dickens and Larry McMurtry. Of all the novels I’ve ever read, Allen Wier’s Tehano best exemplifies John Gardner’s famous dictum that a novel should be a ‘continuous dream.’ What a world Allen Wier has created here; what a country this is! His prodigal imagination, his endless energy and boundless understanding have combined to transport me. Tehano is a feat and a treasure." — Lee Smith
About the Author
Allen Weir is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee.