With echoes of Demon Copperhead and Plainsong, a poignant story about a troubled boy on the run, an aging rancher, and a woman at a crossroads, who find unexpected solace and kinship in the family they make.
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With his long hair and penchant for guitar, teenage Justin is the spitting image of his idol, Kurt Cobain—a resemblance that has often marked him an outcast. When the long-simmering abuse from his uncle finally boils over, Justin has no choice but to break free, in a violent act that will haunt him, and try to make it on his own as a runaway.
Meanwhile, in rural Montana, Rene Bouchard, a rancher nearing retirement, grieves the recent death of his wife. Her passing has revealed precisely how fractured the family has become—particularly the relationship between Rene and his daughter, Lianne. As old wounds ache anew, father and daughter begin to doubt the possibility of reconciliation, even as they each privately yearn for it.
Justin’s wanderings bring him to the Bouchard family ranch, and soon Rene and Lianne take the boy in as their own. But before long, Justin’s past threatens to catch up with him, jeopardizing not only his new bond with Rene and Lianne but also the home he’s finally been able to claim. With its lyricism, tangible evocation of place, and piercing insight reminiscent of the novels of Barbara Kingsolver and Kent Haruf, The Entire Sky is an unforgettable piece of modern, American fiction.
***Winner of the 2024 Montana Book Award***
***Winner of the 2025 High Plains Book Award***
Praise
The book’s language is lyrical and poetic throughout, making even difficult passages somehow beautiful to read even as they raise goosebumps.―New York Journal of Books
Wilkins offers a profound meditation on family and finding one’s identity. The prose is lyrical yet economical, like an elder who dispenses nuggets of wisdom with every utterance . . . Wilkins captures with devastating sensitivity how broken people can mend one another and how acceptance and forgiveness can lead to redemption and love.―Booklist (starred review)
Gorgeous . . . Wilkins’ prose is lush and poetic, often expressing keen emotional insights through the characters’ reflections on the landscape.―High Country News
In desolate, scenic Montana, this novel of lost souls shows them finding themselves in each other . . . The Entire Sky is emotionally powerful and richly descriptive, rapturous in its evocation of the big skies and vast expanse and the lives that have come to seem so small and empty . . . The tale builds with inexorable tension, revealing what has happened, and what could. This is no country for sensitive boys. It’s a novel of flight or fight, of finding family and a home and a reason to live.―Kirkus Reviews
In Wilkins’s lovely latest, a teenage drifter offers a grieving rancher a new lease on life . . . In flashbacks, Wilkins gradually reveals the depth of the pain carried by each of the characters. It adds up to a bracing story of second chances.―Publishers Weekly
The Entire Sky fluctuates between springtime blue promise and the lightning-slash sting of rejection and despair, and finds another patch of blue by the book’s end.―Coast Weekend Magazine
Joe Wilkins’s The Entire Sky exposes with strength and poetry the unjust pain of toxic masculinity and the profound damage it wages on children. In these pages a different potential for manhood is turned over and examined, one that allows for gentleness, healing, acceptance, grace. Wilkins gives an exquisite depth to the Montana landscape and to his characters—this is a textured, bloody, and breathtaking book.―Sharma Shields, award-winning author of The Cassandra and The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac
The Entire Sky is a beautifully written and deeply touching novel about a boy searching for safety and peace, a woman torn between the life she knows well and the new one she and her husband have created, and a man fighting to heal from loss and confronting the passage of time. Each of these characters will stick with me for a long time. I’ll read anything Joe Wilkins writes.―De’Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
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