Black Sun: A Novel

Edward Abbey

Oct 2014 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

From “the Thoreau of the American West,” a novel that chronicles a reckless romance in the wilderness between an aging forester and a young woman (Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove).

Black Sun is a bittersweet love story involving an iconoclastic forest ranger and a freckle-faced “American princess” half his age. Like Lady Chatterley’s lover, he initiates her into the rites of sex and the stark, secret harmonies of his wilderness kingdom. She, in turn, awakens in him the pleasure of love. Then she mysteriously disappears, plunging him into desolation.

Black Sun is a singular novel in Abbey’s repertoire, a romantic story of a solitary man’s passion for the outdoors and for a woman who is his wilderness muse.

“Like most honest novels, Black Sun is partly autobiographical, mostly invention, and entirely true. The voice that speaks in this book is the passionate voice of the forest,” Abbey writes, “the madness of desire, and the joy of love, and the anguish of final loss.”

Praise for Edward Abbey:

“Abbey can attain a kind of glory in his writing. He takes scenes that have been well-traveled by other writers, and re-creates them as traditional American myths.” —New York Times Book Review

“One of the very best writers to deal with the American West.” —Washington Post Book World

“Abbey is a fresh breath from the farther reaches and canyons of the diminishing frontier.” —Houston Chronicle

About the author

Edward Abbey spent most of his life in the American Southwest. He was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the celebrated Desert Solitaire, which decried the waste of America’s wilderness, and the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the title of which is still in use today to describe groups that purposefully sabotage projects and entities that degrade the environment. Abbey was also one of the country’s foremost defenders of the natural environment. He died in 1989.