Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountain
(Fourth Estate)

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Synopsis

Brokeback Mountain is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands – ‘drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, tough spoken’ – glad to have found each other’s company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for, something deadly.

Biography

Annie Proulx published her first novel Postcards in 1991 at the age of 56. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News, the acclaimed novels Accordion Crimes and That Old Ace in the Hole, and the bestselling short story collection, Close Range.

Contributors Testimonials

Two young ranch hands, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, first meet in 1963 when they spend a summer working as herder and camp tender on a sheep farm at Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming. Isolated in a harsh, vivid landscape, the closeness which develops between them doesn’t even have a name, and if it did they certainly wouldn’t dare speak it for fear of lynching. Proulx fills these 58 short pages with joyously beautiful writing and always eschews sentiment for what reads like true feeling. This is a real love story, all rough sexiness and absolute heartbreak, and it says more about the strange complexities.

Zoe Strachan

I’ve been a fan of Annie Proulx since she had that stubborn ‘E.’ fixed at the front of her name like cow-horns on the bumper of a truck, a spiky declaration of independence. Her writing teaches you to see and hear. It turns moments that would otherwise pass you by into aching dramas you can’t shake from your mind. Brokeback is a love story as passionate and tragic as Romeo and Juliet except its teenage lovers are cowboys who go at it with spit in their hands. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are rough men. They call each other what they call their horses - “Little darlin” - and mistake the pain of separation for food poisoning. But there is a tenderness and urgency in their passion that leaves you thirsting for a love like that.

Frances Dickenson