Indie Next Pick for Sept 2018 and July 2019
Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times Bestseller
Named Book of the Month, July 2019 —The Times (United Kingdom)
Named a Book of the Year for 2019 —BBC History Magazine
Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Parade, Fodor’s Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and others.
Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Selected a Best Book of the Year by Powell’s
Finalist for the Ken Kesey Award
Winner of the Will Rodgers Medallion
Finalist for the HWA Gold Crown Award (UK)
The Beloved Queer Western
"A thunderclap of originality, here is a fresh voice and fresh take on one of the oldest stories we tell about ourselves as Americans and Westerners. It's riveting in all the right ways -- a damn good read that stayed with me long after closing the covers." – Timothy Egan, New York Time bestselling author of THE WORST HARD TIME; winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“John Larison’s western epic…feels operatic in its ambition and intensity—a rich melodrama of gun-slinging, hidden identities, conflicted loyalties, and high-stakes emotion, likely to become a modern classic of the western genre. — Kim Fu author of FOR TODAY I AM A BOY
“True Grit meets Blood Meridian.” —Stuart Neville, author of The Ghosts of Belfast
"Whiskey When We’re Dry is as good as its striking title, which itself speaks to a parched, desperate desire, the same type of desire that drives Jessilyn Harney as she collides with the rugged West in all its dirty-fingernailed glory’—Michael Farris Smith, author of The Fighter
"An orphan girl straight out of a Gillian Welch song, betrayed in every way imaginable by the brutality that 'won the West,' is left no way to hew a family or honor but to become a virtuoso cross-dressed killer of Manifest Destiny's men. As Jessilyn Harney takes on the great lies and liars with lyrical violence, her voice takes flight, becoming a sustained, forlornly beautiful, mind-bending aria for our age." – David James Duncan, author of The River Why
"Whiskey When We're Dry is a newfangled tale of the lawless old West, the story of a surprising heroine, a "trick-shooter" who can inflict death in a duel or a brawl. In her search for home and family, orphaned Jessilyn Harney rides out on a lonely quest, and invents herself anew, finding "love outside of chance." Narrated in a rough voice cobbled out of slang and sagebrush, and a sharp sense of humor, Larison's novel is a vivid and fast-paced frontier saga." --Kate Manning, author, My Notorious Life