<DIV>Leonard Self has spent a year unwinding his ranch, paying down debts, and fending off <I>the darkening</I>. Just one thing left: taking his wife's ashes to her favorite overlook, where he plans to step off the cliff with her into a stark and beautiful landscape. But Leonard finds he has company on a route that intertwines old wounds and new insights that make him question whether his life is over after all.<BR><BR><B>Charlie Quimby</B>'s writing career has spanned the arts, business and public policy. Now he writes fiction, blogs at <I>Across the Great Divide</I> and volunteers with the homeless in Minneapolis and western Colorado.<br><BR>?Charlie Quimby’s <I>Monument Road</I> is a fine novel about the New West but also just plain a fine novel. In Quimby’s elegant prose, the character of Leonard Self emerges as endearing and maddening both, and around him Quimby builds an entire community of full-blown and enigmatic and always-original characters. This is a novel with size and scope and generosity, with an acute understanding of human nature and a deep appreciation for the ways people face change and work out their lives in relation to each other.”<BR>?<B>Kent Meyers</B>, author of <I>Twisted Tree</I> and <I>The Work of Wolves</I><br><BR>"In prose that might have been chiseled from the magnificent landscape he describes, Charlie Quimby has written a great big American Novel. Full of pathos and humor and sadness, you won't reach the end of this book without feeling fuller and wiser. What a gift Charlie has given us."<BR>?<B>Peter Geye</B>, author of <I>The Lighthouse Road</I> and <I>Safe from the Sea</I><BR><BR>"<I>Monument Road</I> is a legitimate modern western, complete with an impressively authentic and aging rancher, heartache, ghosts, low-lifes, a rural landscape undergoing radical transformation, a glut of evangelical churches, and the ancient, powerful cliffs and mesas that surround it all, in southwestern Colorado. The narrative is likewise unpredictable and wild! A pleasure to read."<BR>?<B>Bonnie Nadzam</B>, author of <I>Lamb</I><BR><BR>"The landscape and characters of <I>Monument Road</I> ring true. Charlie Quimby has created a story that is hard to forget. His attention to the details of a fading life and life style are spot on and will be a window to any reader's understanding of the central phenomenon of the New West."<BR>?<B>Dan O'Brien</B>, author of <I>Stolen Horses</I> and <I>Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch</I><BR><BR>"<I>Monument Road</I> is a big-hearted novel chock full of memorable characters, a pleasure to read.<BR>?<B>David Rhodes</B>, author of <I>Jewelweed</I> and <I>Driftless</I><BR></DIV>