Wallace Stegner · 1943 · road

Wallace Stegner's 1943 novel, drawn closely from his own childhood. Bo Mason believes the big score is waiting somewhere just over the next range, and moves his wife and two sons across the American and Canadian West for thirty years looking for it - North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, Utah, Nevada - and it is never there.

1. 1
   Minnesota

   Elsa Norgaard leaves her father's house in a Minnesota village in 1905 after her mother's death and her father's remarriage - the first move in the book, and the only one she makes for her own reasons.

2. 2
   Grand Forks

   In North Dakota she meets Bo Mason, who runs a blind pig and has already run away from an abusive father - charming, quick, short-tempered, and convinced the world owes him something it has not yet handed over.

3. 3
   Seattle

   West to the lumber camps of Washington, and the pattern of the marriage sets: a scheme, a move, a failure, and a family that has to pack again - with Elsa doing the packing and the two boys learning what to expect.

4. 4
   Iowa

   Back east and down to Iowa, the direction of travel reversing without the situation improving - and by now Chet and Bruce have been in enough schools to have stopped expecting to finish a year in any of them.

5. 5
   Whitemud

   Saskatchewan, and the closest they come to a home: five years of winters in town and summers on a homestead near the Montana line, wheat prices high and yields low - and Bo building a two-storey house to mend a marriage.

6. 6
   Great Falls

   The 1918 flu makes liquor medicine, and a car full of it bought in Montana in a blizzard turns into a business. With Prohibition in, Bo buys a faster car and moves the family to Montana to run it properly.

7. 7
   Salt Lake City

   Bootlegging in the most respectable city in the West, changing houses whenever the police get close - Bruce's adolescence spent in a place where the family's business makes them permanent outsiders.

8. 8
   Reno

   The last move, and the end of the road for all of it: Elsa dies, and Bo, who has spent thirty years and a family looking for a mountain that was never there, shoots himself in a hotel room in 1932.