Read the book
The complete novel, shared as an advance reading copy ahead of publication. The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, a Native-owned house, at the end of September 2026. If you are a reviewer, bookseller, educator, or reader, you are welcome to read it now.
A dry-eyed, deeply voiced Western about the years the United States took the Far West, told from the saddle of a man who was paid to be present and expected to keep quiet. Enos is a polyglot renegade packer who moves through Frémont's armed crossing of California, the secret dispatches near Klamath Lake, the burned villages, the Bear Flag, and at last to a gallows above the beach at Port Orford.
It is a novel about who writes the record and who gets erased from it. Where the record is silent, the book imagines; where it speaks, it tries to listen.
Read the full advance copy (PDF) →
The complete manuscript, 272 pages. Please do not quote from it in print before publication without checking the final text.
Prefer a taste first? Read the opening chapter, meet the cast at The People of the Record, or go deeper into the history in the Reading Room.
For readers of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, Hernan Diaz's Trust, and Percival Everett's James.
Get word when the book is out.
One note when The Renegade Enos publishes at the end of September. No noise.
By H.L. Delaney · published by Basalt Sea Press. We never share your address.