{"product_id":"groundtruth-paperback","title":"Groundtruth - Paperback","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eNick Hershenow\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom the author of \u003cem\u003eThe Road Builder, \u003c\/em\u003ewinner of the 2002 Western States Book award for fiction, a novel of hardship and courage, of calamity, resurgence, and redemption.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGroundtruth tells the story of Chele Cruz: orphan without family, prodigy, mentor. Wise child. Tamer of feral horses and feral children. But Chele is a little feral himself. He wanders, rebels, drops out of school. He goes riding with the precocious Tania - nymphet, gangster child, trouble. And a reckless search for his prostitute mother ends in disaster, broken faith, and banishment from the orphanage sanctuary of his childhood.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt tells the story of the McKeanes - heirs to a hard-used back country ranch, a legacy of delusion and obsession, and convictions of manifest destiny now matured into a darker strain of fatalism. Their schemes unravel at the moment of fruition. They unleash calamity. And they adjust to failure by immediately turning their attention to new and more outrageous hopes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeparate stories, parallel histories and destinies. They converge in Chele's journey of exile through mountains and canyons, the ancestral territory of the McKeanes, where he encounters pyromaniacal ghosts of his childhood, flesh-and-blood predators, and McKeanes both living and dead. Where beneath the shadow of a giant smoke plume and in the company of 2000 sheep and a wandering matriarch, he assembles out of of broken strands of genealogy and coincidence an origin myth all his own.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGroundtruth is an adventure story, a coming-of-age story, a love story, and a family epic. It's about fire ecology and family ecology, exile and displacement, and cycles of degeneration and restoration on personal, familial, and landscape scales. It's both dark and funny, in a weird way even optimistic - the story of an unlikely quest for family and transformative passage through contrasting landscapes, cultures, and mythologies \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 330\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0.74 x 9 x 6 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e February 22, 2026\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46898581045387,"sku":"9798994217801","price":30.33,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0670\/2579\/7259\/files\/3rGSUsO3qr9798994217801.webp?v=1778586418","url":"https:\/\/thetaletrade.com\/products\/groundtruth-paperback","provider":"The Tale Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}