BOOKS BY MARGARET ERHART


crossing bully creedCrossing Bully Creek | 2005

“On the sickbed there was no difference between man and woman, white and colored, rich and poor,” Rutha Brown observes at the beginning of this richly nuanced novel about the dawning of the Civil Rights Era in the rural South. Henry Detroit, the owner...[more]

 

crossing bully creedOld Love | 1996

Old Love is an honest and daring novel about the American family in our time, about shifting loyalties, about loss and rediscovery, about sexual initiation and the human hunger for intimacy. It is the story of Tommie and Frank Haas and their two precocious children ...[more]

 

crossing bully creedAugusta Cotton | 1992

Told through the voice of Augusta Cotton as she recollects her childhood, this imaginative novel captures the magical and turbulent times of two eleven-year-old girls searching for meaning in the quiet confusion that surrounds them. It is the end of 1963. Augusta’s...[more]

 

crossing bully creedUnusual Company | 1987

Set on both coasts and in the teeming and luminous neighborhoods of Santa Fe, this is the story of how we love: how we arrive at love, and how we are haunted by our lovers when we leave them. Twenty-two-year-old Franny meets Claire, her first love, her first...[more]

 

crossing bully creedBest American Spiritual Writing | 2005

The Best American series has been the premier annual s howcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. For each volume, the very best pieces are selected by a leading writer in the field, making the Best American series the most respected… [more]

 

butterflies of grand canyonbuy this book

“The desert air can do funny things to a person, and soon this respectable woman falls in love with another man. It all feeels like an E. M. Forster novel, but set in the scenic American West.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

. . .

"In this deceptively gentle, wise novel, Margaret Erhart, who’s been compared to Faulkner and Austen, somehow channels Ngaio Marsh and Vladimir Nabokov as well. With collecting net and heart in hand, she and her characters snare some beautiful mysteries.”

Alan Weisman, author of
The World Without Us

 

 

The Butterflies of Grand Canyon

En route from St. Louis to visit her in-laws in Flagstaff, Arizona, young Jane Merkle meets two women botanists on the train. Their paths cross again after Jane, having lost her luggage and traded her fancy dresses for dungarees and a butterfly net, becomes enthralled with her new surroundings and ranger Euell Wigglesworth. As it turns out, Elzada Clover, one of the botanists, is in town to help investigate a 13-year-old murder, and as the mystery unfolds and dark secrets come to light, the canyon works its magic on Jane.

Erhart, a river and hiking guide, teases her readers about the sweet silliness of human affairs in the face of the magnitude of nature, and the cleverly plotted mystery becomes a lark of a vehicle for Erhart’s thoughtful prose. The novel is light and agreeable, touched with just the right amount of awe at the splendors of nature.

The Butterflies of Grand Canyon was a top ten finalist in the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

Reviews:
Blogcritics.org

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The Butterflies of Grand Canyon
Margaret Erhart
Plume / 2009
$15 paper (352p)
ISBN 978-0-452-29549-0