Elk River Books will celebrate the season kickoff of the downtown Livingston 4th Friday Art Walk with a book signing by Alix Christie, author of the sweeping historical novel The Shining Mountains, on Friday, June 23, from 5:30 to 8 pm.
Set in the Rocky Mountain West of the 1800s, The Shining Mountains is the story of Angus McDonald, a young Scotsman forced from his homeland and contracted to British masters to trade for fur along the rivers of what was to become the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. Here he meets a Métis woman, Catherine Baptiste, kin to Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) chiefs. The lands where they begin to raise a family are soon torn apart by competing claims among British fur traders, American settlers, and the Native peoples who have lived for millennia in the shadow of the Shining Mountains.
“Alix Christie has not only written a generous and spirited novel of the fur trade and the marriage of two worlds, she has written a rousing adventure tale steeped in research and oral histories,” writes Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. “Humorous and deeply tender, I admire The Shining Mountains for its vivid and emotionally rendered characters, its magnificent landscape, and how Christie captures the extraordinary power of living story.”
Christie is a direct descendant of Angus McDonald’s brother Duncan. Her debut novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, was published in 2014. She has reported for newspapers in California and from Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, the Guardian of London, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon.com. She currently reviews books and arts for The Economist, and lives in San Francisco.
Elk River Books is located at 122 S. 2nd St. in downtown Livingston. With a curated collection of fine used, rare, antiquarian and new books, as well as prints, maps, ephemera and gifts, it is a treasured destination for book lovers and collectors across the country.
