The Bone Pickers

Against the flamboyant background of the “Golden Spread,” the oil-rich Panhandle of the late 1950s, Al Dewlen has poised a full-scale and truly original novel of one Texas family—the Mungers of Amarillo. The six Munger siblings are the heirs of hard-drinking, hardscrabble farmer Cecil Munger, who in one generation brought his family from Dust Bowl poverty to unfathomable wealth. Sitting as directors of the several corporations in which their wealth resides, five of the siblings—Spain, Texas, Laska, China, and Bethel—struggle to balance their past with their present, their place in society, and their obligations to community, to themselves, and to their damaged and dependent brother June, confined to the old homestead. Wayward humor, warmth and passion, vigorous and imaginative revelation silhouette their individual rebelliousness against the debilitating restrictions of the family empire. Lon Tinkle called Dewlen a born storyteller and praised The Bone Pickers for having “the kind of novelistic vision that makes the reader press on to the end without stopping.” This drama of human need, hidden dreams, and battered aspirations occurs in characters of such depth they may well become the most vivid people you know. . . .The ambience and essence of matters uniquely Texan is a pervasive underscore to gripping themes and raw, rending conflicts. —W.U. McCoy, from his new introduction