John Larison

Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Oprah.com, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor's Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR's All Things Considered. "A thunderclap of originality, here is a fresh voice and fresh take on one of the oldest stories we tell about ourselves as Americans and Westerners. It's riveting in all the right ways -- a damn good read that stayed with me long after closing the covers." - Timothy Egan, New York Times bestselling author of The Worst Hard Time From a blazing new voice in fiction, a gritty and lyrical American epic about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and heads west In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family's homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess's quest lands her in the employ of the territory's violent, capricious Governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah--dead or alive. Wrestling with her brother's outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right. Told in Jess's wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We're Dry is a stunning achievement, an epic as expansive as America itself--and a reckoning with the myths that are entwined with our history.

Whiskey When We're Dry

Facing starvation and worse when she is orphaned on her family's 1885 homestead, seventeen-year-old sharpshooter Jessilyn Harney cuts off her hair and disguises herself as a boy to journey across the mountains in search of her outlaw brother.

Whiskey when we're dry

A Novel

Ancients

a novel

Holding lies

With Holding Lies, John Larison takes us deep into a thriving subculture of the Northwest, one born of ferns and firs, rain and hot-springs, salmon and whitewater. He takes us even deeper into the troubles of Hank Hazelton, a fifty-nine-year-old river guide, as he struggles to reconnect with his daughter after a long estrangement. Before his daughter’s arrival, Hank discovers a drift boat stranded below a rapid, its oarsman missing. Within days, the sheriff has opened a murder investigation, one that to Hank appears more about old grudges than objective evidence. When Hank himself becomes a suspect, he’s forced to confront the violent past of his home valley—and his own culpability. In a novel about finding family in unlikely places, Larison breathes life into a community rich with history, sin, and hope, a place where bears still wander side streets and time is still marked by the seasons of the river. Holding Lies is a taut, big-hearted novel, steeped in the ecology of place and peopled with unforgettable characters.

John Larison

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