An Unfinished Life

by Mark Spragg, Tony Amendola (Read by), Judith Marx (Read by)

Jean Gilkyson, pregnant when her husband was killed, is raising their daughter, Griff, in an Iowa trailer house with yet another brutal boyfriend, when she realizes this can’t go on. But the only refuge available is a town in Wyoming where her loved ones are dead and her father-in-law wishes she was too. ,For a decade he has blamed her for his son’s death, choosing to go on living himself largely because his oldest friend otherwise couldn’t survive. Bound as close as brothers, they face old age on a faltering ranch, their interdependence even more acute after one was crippled and the other mauled by his own pain.

Suddenly Griff meets this grandfather she’d never heard about, not to mention a black cowboy confined to the bunkhouse, and irrepressibly claims her new life in hopes of turning grievous loss and recrimination toward reconciliation and love.

Genres: Fiction, Book Club, Westerns, Contemporary, Audiobook, Adult Fiction, Romance

510 pages, Audio CD

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the 2000 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers award, and the novels, The Fruit of Stone, An Unfinished Life, and, Bone Fire. All four were top-ten Book Sense selections and An Unfinished Life was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. Spragg’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Wyoming with his wife, Virginia, with whom he wrote the screenplay for the film version of his novel, An Unfinished Life, starring Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, and Jennifer Lopez, and released in 2005.