Moving On

Larry McMurtry's novel takes place in the 1960s, moving between the flashy honky-tonk world of rodeo circuits and the bleak, restless life of the Houston suburbs. Its central figure is Patsy Carpenter, a young woman who is striking, quick-witted and hard to resist. She and her unreliable husband, Jim, drift through the American West with no firm sense of where they belong.

McMurtry, a Texas writer best known for The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove, often wrote about small towns and restless people on the edges of the Southwest.