SUN GOING DOWN
A Novel

by Jack Todd

Available in paperback August 4, 2009!

Touchstone / Simon & Schuster
www.simonandschuster.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5049-5
$16.00 Trade Paperback

ISBN-13:  978-1-4165-5048-8
$26.00 Hardcover
Fiction

From an award-winning author whose ancestors lived the adventures in this novel comes a spectacular epic about the American West.

“SUN GOING DOWN travels far beyond the Western genre. It is a beautifully written link with human ancestry that will resonate with all who treasure reading. Once begun, the pages do not stop turning.”
- Michael Blake, author of Dances With Wolves and The Holy Road

“Very few historical novels I have come across since I first read the manuscript of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove have impressed and pleased me more than Jack Todd’s SUN GOING DOWN…McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy have proved again and again that there is still life – and art – in the Western, and Jack Todd has offered further proof that the big Western novel is at once a living part of our national literature and as much a part of popular fiction as ever.”
- Michael Korda, author of Ulysses S. Grant and Ike

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MBA Bookseller Information

Order from your Simon & Schuster rep or through wholesalers. MBA and the publisher would love to have your comments, reviews, and praise for this fascinating book. Please send them to us so we can share your endorsements with your fellow MBA booksellers and with your customers!

SUN GOING DOWN is an excellent choice for reading groups. (See the reading group guide and other materials below for discussion topic ideas.)

If you would like to inquire about an event or book club phone conversation with author Jack Todd, please contact his publicist Kelly Bowen, kelly.bowen@simonandschuster.com.

We have lots of great promotional materials available on this book, including an author Q&A and the author’s essay about his family history and its incorporation into this novel. Check out the old photos of the author’s ancestors, too!

Downloads

• Full-color sign/flyer (PDF) — hardcover
• Reading group guide (PDF)
• Small B&W print ad (PDF) — hardcover
• Author essay about the book (PDF)
• Q&A with author Jack Todd (PDF)
• NEW!  Book photo (JPG) — trade paperback
• Book photo (JPG) — hardcover
• Author photo (JPG)
• Jack Todd’s family photos – the real people behind the novel! (URL)
• Publisher resources for this book (URL)
• Midwest Connections Rebate Form (PDF) — available on the hardcover in 2008
• Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials

About the Book

 ”Jack Todd has written a big, old-fashioned, historical saga teeming with memorably depicted men and women and packed with incident. SUN GOING DOWN is as rich and exciting and larger than life as the American West it so vividly brings alive.”
- Lewis De Soto, author of A Blade of Grass 

Part history, part romance, and part action-adventure novel, SUN GOING DOWN follows the fortunes of Ebenezer Paint and his descendants — rough and tough individuals who are caught up in Civil War river battles, epic cattle drives through drought and blizzards, the horrors of Wounded Knee, the desperation of the dust bowl, and the prosperity of the roaring 1920s. The page-turning plot is peopled by a vibrant, unforgettable cast of characters: a grizzled Mississippi steamboat merchant, two horse-thieving brothers, five Annie Oakley-like sisters who can outride any cowboy, a half-Sioux bride who demands her new family claim her heritage, and a courageous daughter who defies her father and braves the West alone. Throughout their lives, the Paint family must battle both internal and external elements, and learn to live with spirit and wit.

Letters and diaries from the author’s own family archives form the basis for all the events and characters in SUN GOING DOWN, infusing the novel with richly detailed authenticity and deep emotional power. It is intimate in its portraits of the unforgettable characters who settled our country, sweeping in its geographical reach from Vicksburg up through Montana and the Dakotas, and epic as it spans four generations from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Masterfully written, SUN GOING DOWN holds the reader fast through tears, laughter, terror, and joy until the very last heart-gripping page is turned.

About the Author

For the past 10 years, Jack Todd has been sports columnist of the Montreal Gazette. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska, where he was a scholarship athlete in track and field. After working for several newspapers, Todd left the U.S. during the Vietnam War and settled in Canada. He has covered two World Cup soccer tournaments and five Olympic Games. Todd won the National Newspaper Award for sports writing in 1999, an honor for which he has been nominated three times. His book, The Taste of Metal, was short-listed for a Governor General’s Award and won the Mavis Gallant Award for non-fiction.