Cirrus@Austlit

'Finn Wheeler, a journalist from New France, Quebec, is assigned to cover the US presidential bid of Senator Joseph Anderton, a charismatic Black politician. Motivated by the discovery of a family heirloom, he decides to combine the assignment with an investigation into the origins of the celebrated rock buffalo monument in North Dakota.

'Driving across the United States, he witnesses America in a state of near anarchy as public anger over racial injustice explodes. Once in North Dakota, he falls in love with Evie, a young Mandan woman, and becomes obsessed with 'unriddling' the enigmatic stone buffalo.

'Shortly after winning the Republican presidential nomination, Anderton is assassinated, and a deeply-fractured United States totters on the brink of civil war. A shocked Finn reports on the crisis while at the same time struggling to come to terms with his startling discoveries about his ancesteral legacy.' (Publication summary)

'America emerges from the trauma of the Civil War to find itself convulsed by rapid and often violent social and political change. Millions of land-hungry emigrants from all over the world flock to claim a piece of the newly ‘liberated’ Indian territories.

'The prospect of overnight fortunes attracts a flood of gold miners, prospectors, con men, gamblers, and homesteaders to the booming territories as the railroads open up more and more of the frontier for settlement. The dispossessed and impoverished Native Americans are swept by messianic movements that promise the return of the vast buffalo herds.

'In the midst of this upheaval, Purchase McLennan fights to retain the family legacy—the great patriarchal rock now the target of an unscrupulous speculator. The forces of greed, desperation, bigotry and ambition collide in a shattering climax that ushers in the new century and a profoundly changed America.' (Publication summary)

'Lost and alone on the vast prairies of 18th century America, Boundless McLennan, an escaped convict, chances upon a striking rock monolith. Awed by the teeming herds of buffalo that roam the surrounding grasslands, he becomes fixated with the idea of carving the rock into a giant monument to the prodigious beast.

'Against a backdrop of war, disease, and personal tragedy, Boundless struggles to achieve his vision, pitting his fierce will against the implacable rock in an obsessive desire to ‘make the world sit up and take notice’.

'One man’s determination to leave his mark on history begets a haunting, multigenerational saga of ambition, greed, violence, and greatness that is the story of America itself.' (Publication summary)

'Boundless McLennan, a young Scottish printer, is sentenced to indentured servitude in the American colonies for the crime of seditious libel. Upon landing in the New World, he escapes and learns of a marvellous beast inhabiting the far western plains.

'A trapper takes Boundless under his wing and seduces him with tales of endless grasslands beyond the Alleghenies where the buffalo are rumoured to be so plentiful that ‘Jehovah himself could not count the heads’. Together, they set out on an epic adventure across a thousand miles of wilderness full of dangers—from bandits, wild animals, hostile Indians, and a brutal war between England and France for possession of the New World.

'Despite the perils of the journey, Boundless is determined to lay eyes on the mysterious creature that beckons him to his destiny on the vast, windswept plains.' (Publication summary)