Larry McMurtry triumphantly returns with this ballad in prose: a heartfelt tribute to the people and places of the bygone American West, from a writer who has done more than any other to shape our image of the period.

Long Grass, Texas. Once hailed as heroes for their days of subduing drunks in Abilene and Dodge - more often with a mean look than a pistol - the taciturn Wyatt Earp now idles away his time between bottles, while the dentist-turned-gunslinger Doc Holliday is more adept at poker than extracting teeth. With the buffalo herds gone, the Comanche defeated, and vast swaths of the Great Plains enclosed by cattle ranches, Wyatt and Doc live on, even as the storied West that forged their myths disappears.

McMurtry traces the rich and varied friendship of the heroic pair from the town of Long Grass to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, then to Mobetie, Texas, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, culminating with the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral, rendered here in McMurtry's stark and peerless prose.

As harsh and beautiful, and as brutal and captivating as the open range it depicts, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of the most original American writers.

'A deftly narrated, often comically subversive work of fiction . . . If Lonesome Dove is a chronicle of the cattle-driving West that contains within its vast, broad ranges a small but heart-rending intimate tragedy of paternal neglect, The Last Kind Words Saloon is a dark postmodernist modernist comedy' Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

'Those who enjoy McMurtry's rueful humour and understated tone of elegiac melancholy will devour the book in one setting' Washington Post