WEST FROM THE CRADLE

by Brigid Amos

Narrator James G. Charron

Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

June 26th 2019

Clean Reads

Genre: Historical Fiction

Brigid Amos' Top Ten Literary Inspirations

Thomas Hardy, because he combines story and style so beautifully.
Flannery O’Connor, because she always gives me something to ponder.
Carson McCullers, for the way she gets into a character’s head.
Shirley Jackson, for both her chilling short stories and her hilarious essays.
Larry McMurtry, for making me realize I wanted to write historical fiction.
Thomas Wolfe, for his crazy gorgeous language and letting us into his life.
Edith Wharton, for her mastery of structure.
George Eliot, who could hold her own among the male writers of her day.
Charlotte Bronte, because I read Jane Eyre when I was too young but still got it.
Emily Bronte, who was an incredibly brave writer and had so much more to give.

Travis Cooper was never meant to be a prospector. But when shopkeeper Raymond Hillerman shows him a copy of the California Star in the fall of 1848, one shining word jumps off the page: gold! That one word changes everything.

Undersized and bookish, Travis isn’t the sort who would leave his home in Missouri to make the perilous journey west to California. Not much help on the farm, he’s certainly not likely to take up the backbreaking work of a gold miner. Besides, it’s his older brother Jonas that Mr. Hiller-man has hired as his partner in the diggings. But when their father is injured, Jonas must stay be-hind to work the farm, and Travis sets out on the trail in his brother’s place.

Along with adventure comes danger, and Travis discovers that staying alive is more difficult than he ever imagined. Keeping his partner from getting himself killed may be downright im-possible....

Brigid Amos’ fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin, The Storyteller, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Words of Wisdom. Her historical novels are set in the old California mining towns of the nineteenth century and include A Fence Around Her and West from the Cradle (Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist). A produced playwright, she co-founded Angels Playwriting Collective and serves on the board of Angels Theatre Company. Although Brigid left a nugget of her heart behind in the California Gold Country, most of it is in Lincoln, Nebraska where she currently lives with her husband.

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I am a Civil engineering technologist by trade, however I have been a voice actor for the last 3 years, narrating 5 audiobooks, radio commercials, and now producer of The Interview Dudes Podcast hosted by 3 eleven yr old boys (one of which is my son). The podcast has interviewed 2 Oscar winners, an Emmy nominee, a NYT bestselling author/illustrator, Canada's first astronaut in space, NASA research engineer on the Cassini project, a oceanographer from NOAA, a volcanologist from NASA and many more!