The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis: A Novel of Lewis & Clark

"Packed with strange characters and striking discoveries, The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis explores one of America's most legendary adventures and surveys the emotional landscape of its sorry hero...Absorbing, insightful and heartrending...the mix of modern and 18th-century events is strange and startling. Pritchett has created two distinct but entwined voices that provide an absorbing reenactment of history and what goes on in a writer's mind."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
"With publication of Michael Pritchett's debut novel, "The Melancholy Fate of Captain Lewis," Unbridled has again introduced an extraordinary writer to the world...the novel will also stay with me for a long time, because Bill Lewis and Pritchett's other fictional creations are so skillfully rendered."--The Denver Post
"Pritchett has achieved something pretty intricate here: He has wrapped the real-life explorer Meriwether Lewis in a contemporary fiction. The tension between past and present, reality and imagination, helps give the book its considerable urgency."--Kansas City Star
..".the life of explorer Lewis is juxtaposed with that of his modern-day biographer, Bill Lewis, a high school teacher who struggles against his own depression. Pritchett, a writing teacher at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shows that past and present have more in common than we usually believe."--Oregonian
"I...was immediately drawn in...[R]esolves the double-layered journey into a sweet and satisfying chord."--Montana Magazine
"The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis is a truly splendid novel of history, one that illuminates the great themes that such novels uniquely can. It shows us how the past is always with us and how the passions and tremblings of the human spirit endure even the passage of centuries. With this book, Michael Pritchett has instantly established himself as one of our finest novelists."-Robert Olen Butler
"Ambitious...A challenging.

"Packed with strange characters and striking discoveries, The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis explores one of America's most legendary adventures and surveys the emotional landscape of its sorry hero...Absorbing, insightful and heartrending...the mix of modern and 18th-century events is strange and startling. Pritchett has created two distinct but entwined voices that provide an absorbing reenactment of history and what goes on in a writer's mind."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

"With publication of Michael Pritchett's debut novel, "The Melancholy Fate of Captain Lewis," Unbridled has again introduced an extraordinary writer to the world...the novel will also stay with me for a long time, because Bill Lewis and Pritchett's other fictional creations are so skillfully rendered."--The Denver Post

"Pritchett has achieved something pretty intricate here: He has wrapped the real-life explorer Meriwether Lewis in a contemporary fiction. The tension between past and present, reality and imagination, helps give the book its considerable urgency."--Kansas City Star

..".the life of explorer Lewis is juxtaposed with that of his modern-day biographer, Bill Lewis, a high school teacher who struggles against his own depression. Pritchett, a writing teacher at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shows that past and present have more in common than we usually believe."--Oregonian

"I...was immediately drawn in...[R]esolves the double-layered journey into a sweet and satisfying chord."--Montana Magazine

"The Melancholy Fate of Capt. Lewis is a truly splendid novel of history, one that illuminates the great themes that such novels uniquely can. It shows us how the past is always with us and how the passions and tremblings of the human spirit endure even the passage of centuries. With this book, Michael Pritchett has instantly established himself as one of our finest novelists."-Robert Olen Butler

"Ambitious...A challenging novel that can lead you to reconsider one of our country's greatest adventure stories."--Seattle Times

"The alternating sections reveal Pritchett's mastery of voice . . . this is a remarkable exploration of the life of one of history's great explorers."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"The special eloquence of Michael Pritchett's new novel about Lewis and Clark is rooted in his understanding of the melancholy that follows discovery and the closure of distance. When the unknown turns into the known, it is domesticated and thus becomes ours. In this story, the New World turns almost instantly into the Old World, and the melancholy we all suffer from is laid bare, with understanding, compassion, eloquence, and drama, in two parallel narratives that are unforgettable." -Charles Baxter

"An intricate, intelligent and absorbing novel." -Margot Livesey

"When high-school history teacher Bill Lewis decides to write a biography of Meriwether Lewis, he becomes engrossed in both the triumphs and tragedies of the great explorer...the side-by-side story lines complement and reinforce one another...Pritchett's contemporary twist illuminates an old subject in a new light."--Booklist