Dead Man's Walk

Taking you deep into the heart of the American West, Dead Man’s Walk is the first book in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove quartet.

These are the wild days when Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call – heroes of Lonesome Dove – first encounter the untamed frontier that will form their characters.

Not yet twenty, Gus and Call enlist as Texas Rangers under the command of Caleb Cobb, a capricious outlaw determined to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans. The two young men experience their first great adventure in the barren, empty landscape of the great plains, in which arbitrary violence is the only law – whether from nature, or from those whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico.

Danger, sacrifice and fear test Gus and Call to the limits of endurance, as they seek the strength and courage to survive against almost insurmountable odds in the West of early nineteenth-century America.

Continue the series set in the Wild West with Comanche Moon.

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

McMurtry has crafted a tale of love, fear and sacrifice in the face of Wild West adversity. With his vibrant, dynamic landscapes and language that springs from the page, this book captures the heart until the last word The Times
A well-told novel, undemonstrative in its depiction of violence, and it offers a fascinating lesson on the realities of life in the mythical Wild West The Sunday Times
In Dead Man's Walk, McMurtry uses a simple, wry, immensely accessible storyteller's voice to ponder the same questions that Melville and Conrad did. This is a great book . . . Larry McMurtry, at his best here, is one of the finest American novelists, ever Los Angeles Times
Succeeds marvellously . . . resurrecting two brilliantly conceived characters and delivering a rousing tale of the Wild West San Francisco Chronicle

Larry McMurtry was the author of more than thirty novels and memoirs, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. He received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Brokeback Mountain. The cinematic treatment of Terms of Endearment swept the boards at the 1984 Academy Awards, winning Oscars in several categories, including Best Picture. McMurtry died in 2021 in Archer City, TX, at the age of 84.

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