Women in Westerns

Novels set in the west featuring fierce female characters.

Updated March 21, 2024
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Outlawed : a novel
North, Anna
Paper Book
A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK * INDIE NEXT SELECTION * LIBRARY READS SELECTION * AMAZON EDITORS' CHOICE * WASHINGTON POST BEST OF THE YEAR The "terrifying, wise, tender, and thrilling" (R.O. Kwon)...
Westering women : a novel
Dallas, Sandra
Paper Book
It's February, 1852, and all around Chicago, Maggie sees the postings soliciting "eligible women" to travel to the gold mines of Goosetown. A young seamstress with a small daughter and several painful secrets, she has nothing to lose.
Sawbones
Lenhardt, Melissa
Paper Book
Wrongfully accused of murder, Dr. Catherine Bennett is destined to hang. . . unless she can disappear. With the untamed territory of Colorado as her most likely refuge, she packs her physician's kit and heads West. But even with a new life and name, a female doctor with a...
Pity the beast
McLean, Robin
Paper Book
"Not since Faulkner have I read American prose so bristling with life and particularity." --J M Coetzee Following in the footsteps of such chroniclers of American absurdity as Cormac McCarthy, Joy Williams, and Charles Portis, Robin McLean's Pity the Beast...
The bones of paradise
Agee, Jonis
Paper Book
Ten years after the 7th Calvary massacred more than 200 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J. B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J. B.'s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the...
Epitaph : a novel of the O.K. Corral
Russell, Mary Doria
Paper Book
Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sparrow, returns with Epitaph. An American Iliad, this richly detailed and meticulously researched historical novel continues the story she began in Doc, following Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Tombstone, Arizona, and to the...
Heresy
Lenhardt, Melissa
Paper Book
"An all-out women-driven, queer, transgender, multiracial takeover of the Old West . . . and that's exactly what Melissa Lenhardt delivers in her unapologetically badass western, Heresy." - New York Times "Lenhardt has created a bold new story where women...
No man's land : a novel
Vigna, John
Paper Book
A sprawling saga set in the Canadian wilderness of the late 19th century, about a teenaged girl named Davey, a charismatic fraudster, and the unbearable weight of fate. In this powerful, panoramic novel set in the late 1890s, in a sliver of rugged British Columbia wilderness, a...
All God's children
Gwyn, Aaron
Paper Book
Finalist for the Reading the West Book Award for Fiction  A novel about the remarkable people living on the edge of freedom and slavery, All God's Children brings to life the paradoxes of the American frontier - a place of liberty and bondage, wild equality, and cruel injustice.<...
The streel
Logue, Mary
Paper Book
Women Writing the West WILLA Award Finalist From "the reigning royalty of Minnesota murder mysteries" (The Rake) comes a striking new heroine: a young Irish immigrant caught up in a deadly plot in nineteenth-century Deadwood When I was fifteen and...
Eden mine
Hulse, S. M.
Paper Book
Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award, Fiction In Eden Mine, the award-winning author of Black River examines the aftershocks of an act of domestic terrorism rooted in a small Montana town on the brink of abandonment, as it tears apart a family, tests...
Westering women : a novel
Dallas, Sandra
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of Prayers for Sale, Sandra Dallas' Westering Women is an inspiring celebration of sisterhood on the perilous Overland Trail AG Journal's RURAL THEMES BOOKS FOR WINTER READING | Hasty Book Lists' BEST BOOKS COMING OUT IN...
Westering women : a novel
Dallas, Sandra
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of Prayers for Sale, Sandra Dallas' Westering Women is an inspiring celebration of sisterhood on the perilous Overland Trail AG Journal's RURAL THEMES BOOKS FOR WINTER READING | Hasty Book Lists' BEST BOOKS COMING OUT IN...
Inland : a novel
Obreht, Téa
Audiobook
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife returns with "a bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West" (Entertainment Weekly). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time<...
Inland : a novel
Obreht, Te a
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife returns with "a bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West" (Entertainment Weekly). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time<...
True grit
Portis, Charles.
Audiobook
True Grit
The vengeance of mothers : the journals of Margaret Kelly & Molly McGill
Fergus, Jim
Paper Book
The stunning sequel to the award-winning novelOne Thousand White Women:A Novel. "Clever and satisfying...Fergus is a superb writer [and] the characters are as real as any pioneer women who braved the rigors of westering." --The Denver Post ...
Woman of the frontier
Grey, Zane
Paper Book
Logan Huett is a former Army scout who discovers magnificent Sycamore Cañon in central Arizona, where he intends to homestead. With some trepidation, he wires East to the woman he had courted back in Missouri, proposing marriage. Lucinda Baker, a schoolteacher, accepts. But pioneer life...
Where coyotes howl
Dallas, Sandra
Paper Book
1916. The two-street town of Wallace is not exactly what Ellen Webster had in mind when she accepted a teaching position in Wyoming, but within a year's time she's fallen in love -- both with the High Plains and with a handsome cowboy named Charlie Bacon. Life is not easy in the flat, brown corner...
True grit
Portis, Charles.
Paper Book
A #1 New York Times bestseller, Charles Portis's True Grit is "an epic and a legend" (Washington Post), a story of danger and adventure in the Old West--the basis for two award-winning films, the first starring John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning role, as...
Where coyotes howl
Dallas, Sandra
Paper Book
Now a Denver Post bestseller "Addictive. Highly recommended!"--Paulette Jiles, New York Times bestselling author of News of the World Beautifully rendered, Where Coyotes Howl is a vivid and deeply affecting ode to the...
Traces : a novel
Hudson, Patricia L.
Paper Book
An early American adage proclaimed, "The frontier was heaven for men and dogs--hell for women and mules." Since the 1700s, when his name first appeared in print, Daniel Boone has been synonymous with America's westward expansion and life on the frontier. Traces is a retelling of Boone's...
Close range : Wyoming stories
Proulx, Annie.
Paper Book
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of...
Six-gun Snow White
Valente, Catherynne M.
Paper Book
A New York Times bestselling author offers a brilliant reinvention of one of the best-known fairy tales of all time with Snow White as a gunslinger in the mythical Wild West. Forget the dark, enchanted forest. Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are...
The outcasts : a novel
Kent, Kathleen
Paper Book
A taut, thrilling adventure story about buried treasure, a manhunt, and a woman determined to make a new life for herself in the old west. It's the 19th century on the Gulf Coast, a time of opportunity and lawlessness. After escaping the Texas brothel where she'd been a...
Whiskey when we're dry
Larison, John
Paper Book
Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Oprah.com, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor's Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR's All Things Considered.  ...
Girl with a gun : an Annie Oakley mystery
Bovee, Kari
Paper Book
Fifteen-year-old Annie Oakley is the sole supporter of her widowed mother and two siblings. An expert markswoman and independent spirit, she hunts game to sell to the local mercantile to make ends meet instead of accepting a marriage proposal that could solve all her problems. After a stunning...

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