A Horse Named Sorrow

by Healey, Trebor

• ISBN13: 9780299289706
• ISBN10: 0299289702
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-10-23
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Award-winning novelist Trebor Healey depicts San Francisco in the 1980s and '90s in poetic prose that is both ribald and poignant, and a crossing into the American West that is dreamy, mythic, and visionary. When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown in Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: "Take me back the way I came." And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelers-each one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy's death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamus's grief and his story become universal and redemptive.