Fall Back Down When I Die - by Joe Wilkins (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For readers of My Absolute Darling and Fourth of July Creek, a "riveting and timely" Montana story about the unbreakable bond between a young man and the abandoned boy put in his care (Jess Walter), as old grievances of land and blood are visited upon them.

Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand in Montana, has recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan. His bank account holds less than a hundred dollars, and he owes back taxes on what remains of the land his parents owned, as well as money for the surgeries that failed to save his mother's life.

An unexpected deliverance arrives in the form of seven-year-old Rowdy Burns, the mute and traumatized son of Wendell's incarcerated cousin. When Rowdy is put under his care, what begins as an ordeal for Wendell turns into a powerful bond, as he comes to love the boy more than he ever thought possible. That bond will be stretched to the breaking point during the first legal wolf hunt in Montana in more than thirty years, when a murder ignites a desperate chase.

Caught on the wrong side of a disaffected fringe group, Wendell is determined both to protect Rowdy and to avoid the same violent fate that claimed his own father. A gripping story set in a fractured and misunderstood community, Fall Back Down When I Die is a haunting and unforgettable tale of sacrificial love.

Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Review Quotes

"Wilkins delivers a Shakespearean mix of drama and mortal danger in crisp and beautiful language...He renders the effects of violence and trauma on the daily machinations of human lives...The world of the novel, rural Montana, is presented with the native realism of someone familiar with the people, language, landscape, and controversies of the 'way out here'...He captures the social dynamic of communities of few people spread over many swaths of land...This novel instills hope. Wilkins has produced a remarkable book filled with characters who, despite their inherent differences over how to exist on the land, remind us of the myriad reasons that every person might be loved."--Jason Hess, The Oregonian

"Fall Back Down When I Die is a masterpiece. Lean and authentic, this twenty-first century western captures what so many rural Americans on the margins are feeling: righteous anger and bitter disconnection, powerlessness and flinty pride. And yet Joe Wilkins has endowed his unforgettable cast of characters with humanity, gentleness, grace, and hard-won poetry. In prose as rugged and beautiful as the story's Montana setting, Wilkins has written one of the best novels I've read in years. An absolutely stunning book in every way."--Nickolas Butler, author of the national bestseller Shotgun Lovesongs

"A heart-rending tale of family, love and violence...Through these characters, in a prose that can hum gently, then spark like a fire, Wilkins fashions a Western fable which spirals down to a tragic end. Following in the literary roots of Montanans Jim Harrison and Rick Bass, Wilkins packs a lot of story and stylistic wallop into this gripping, outstanding novel."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A tense story delivered in sharp, evocative sentences, Fall Back Down When I Die captures what feel like eternal tensions of land, loyalty, and vengeance. . .Wilkins is also a talented poet, and his sense of sound and line seeps into his prose. . .He has a fine sense of pacing, imbuing the book's final quarter with an almost dizzying suspense. He's at his most poetic when setting the scene with descriptions that create a palpable atmosphere. . .These are melodies of pain and penance -- the right song for a novel about a riven land."--Nick Ripatrazone, National Review

"Gorgeous...Spellbinding...The land itself is almost a living character in the book, rendered both beautiful and ominous in Wilkins's poetic prose...A gripping debut."--Sarah Gilman, High Country News

"In an electric narrative that busts out in a rare rural poetry when you least expect it, this brilliant novel places red state zeitgeist and gray wolves squarely in its sights and, in the end, shoots both, to my grateful amazement, with deep understanding and compassion. What a balm, Joe Wilkins's eloquent voice of mercy calling out in the post-Western night."--David James Duncan, National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of The Brothers K and The River Why

"In his first novel, shorty story writer, poet, and memoirist Wilkins writes of hardscrabble life on the northern Great Plains with mesmerizing power, creating characters with rich if troubled interior lives who are desperate for agency and haunted by absent fathers. Wendell and Rowdy's slowly blossoming relationship is as lovely and breathtaking as the book's tragic ending is inevitable and devastating. Suffused with a sense of longing, loss, and the desire for change -- asking deep questions about our place in the landscape and what, if anything, we are owed -- this is a remarkable and unforgettable first novel."--Booklist (starred review)

"Joe Wilkins has risen to a very special peak with this heartrending novel of hard living and lonesome hope in the vast American landscape. I cannot praise it enough."--Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of the national bestsellers The House of Broken Angels and The Hummingbird's Daughter

"Joe Wilkins is a writer of great power and heart, and Fall Back Down When I Die is a riveting and timely novel."--Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins

"Montana's rugged beauty is poetically evoked in Wilkins's fine debut. This is an accomplished first novel, notable in particular for its strong depiction of the timeless landscape of Montana's big sky country."--Publishers Weekly

"Nuanced and textured...Fall Back Down When I Die seeks to point a way forward toward community and compassion, toward understanding."--Rachel Hergett, Bozeman Daily Chronicle

"Powerful...This is a story of realistic, complex characters whose lives intersect on a big canvas -- as big as eastern Montana...Joe Wilkins infuses his novel with a sense of personal attachment to both the history and current realities of life and conflict across the vast landscape."--Mindy Cameron, Lewiston Tribune

"Stunning, haunting, and complex...Wilkins's combination of vibrant language and characterization elevates the novel...he forces readers to see beyond the stereotypes of rural America and embrace the characters as sophisticated and dynamic individuals...Wilkins's gifts as a seasoned poet and memoirist shine through in his use of figurative language, imagery, sentence fragments, and the way he builds up and tears down the threads of family. Fall Back Down When I Die is a timely addition to the literature of the West. It is a direct and unflinching representation of the way people, land, politics, and myth tangle with each other at the beginning of the twenty-first century."--Andrew Jones, Split Rock Review

"The lurking menaces in the lives of each character in Fall Back Down When I Die are shadowy, elusive, and always just out of reach, complicated by a set of decades-old, interrelated conflicts...the oppressive poverty and hardship that lingers in the atmosphere is palpable."--Erin H. Turner, Big Sky Journal

"The poetry of this beautiful novel isn't only in the language--and it's certainly in that--but also in Joe Wilkins's keen understanding of the Bull Mountains in eastern Montana, of the people who have left their mark on the land there, or tried to erase it, and of the mysterious complexities of the human heart that drive us to one side of the law or the other."--Elizabeth Crook, author of The Which Way Tree

"There isn't a wrong note in Wilkins's novel. He manages to pull off the development of characters simultaneous with a growing sense of unease; the storm is becoming visible on the horizon...Wilkins is evolving into one of our best American writers."--Chris La Tray, The Missoulian

"To read Joe Wilkins's first novel is to spend time in eastern Montana, to feel the sharp wind cutting across the cedar ridges, through the sagebrush and bunchgrass, kicking up dust that gathers into grit at the corner of your eyes. It is to hear the sweet, languid whistles of the meadowlarks in the fields. It is to feel "the gravel and the ruts and the old cracked tires" beneath you and to see, above you, always, the wide sky, its "whole box of colors" and its "extravagant stars," that pull of the sublime to lift your gaze from the intractable earth. And it is to know how hard-earned the beauty is. Wilkins achieves a rich evocation of place through seasoned language, tough and tender like the steak the characters are always eating. It is a landscape where they chew on their trouble, pick old bones, are gnawed at by their losses."--Holly Haworth, Orion Magazine

"Wilkins's novel feels insightful amid the ongoing debate over public land and legal rights, but it's also timeless, and it treads the same kind of territory as writers like Kent Haruf and Ivan Doig, digging into quiet stories of people living close to the land."--Heather Hansman, Outside

"With a passion matched only by his compassion, Joe Wilkins has crafted a novel that perfectly explicates the clash between the cowboys and ranchers of the old West and the environmentalists and seekers of the new. No polemic, Fall Back Down When I Die is populated by vibrant characters drawn with fairness and deep heart, boys and men, girls and women who will get under your skin and stay there, and is full of vivid descriptions of the Montana landscape that are spot-on and swoon-worthy. Finally, this is a book about America: its violence, its traumas, its entitlements, and its stultifying rage."--Pam Houston, author of the national bestsellers Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound

About the Author

Joe Wilkins is the author of the award-winning memoir The Mountain and the Fathers. His work has appeared in the Georgia Review, the Harvard Review, Slate, and elsewhere. He is a Pushcart Prize winner and a finalist for the National Magazine Award and the PEN/USA Award. He lives with his wife and two children in western Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.