Mine Work

A Novel

2000 Spur Award for Best Original Paperback Novel
2000 Medicine Pipe Bearer Award, Western Writers of America

Jim Davidson

"[Mine Work] explodes...into descriptive sprays of language that evoke not just the West by the West's best writers." —The New York Times Book Review

"With a tone that is often reminiscent of Hemingway, the author writes a moving tale of not only power and shame but also of redemption. The book is fine reading." —The Denver Post

When Markus Cottin begins unreeling some of the family mysteries, his father tells him he will find only "a chain of fools, each one worse than the one that came before." His search takes him to Colorado mining towns, to the Navajo reservation, and around the desert Four Corners region, and the tale he turns up is a shameful one of race politics and union troubles of the 1950s. When he finds his own family involved in bombings and the murder of a Navajo man, he won't stop pursuing it until the story leads him link by link to his grandfather, his father, and ultimately back to himself.

A powerful first novel by Colorado native, Jim Davidson, a writer who knows the intricacies of the region, road by dusty road.