“Drury’s world is so far from where we are that it seems to glow across the sky at intervals like a lunar heartbeat. Yet West of Loveland, a new and most welcome Grouse County novel, is also a strangely familiar ‘return to the state of loss we thought to remedy.’ ‘This place is dying for voices’ he tells us, and Tom Drury’s voice is like no one else’s. It was Chekhov who insisted that a gun appearing in the first act must go off by the third, and it might occur to readers that Drury is a version of a future-tense, midwestern Chekhov who nevertheless insists that all good, bright lives are shot through with a saving depth of darkness.”—Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Night Watch, Black Tickets, and Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir