"Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove has become the novel about 
the Old West by which subsequent similar novels are judged. 
Allen Wier’s epic Western just might be the one to finally give 
McMurtry a run for his money."—Denver Post

"Tehano is a terrific novel, an epic tale of the Western frontier 
that is superior to Lonesome Dove: better written, more 
smoothly plotted, more historically accurate. It may well be the 
Great Texas Novel."—Dallas Morning News

"Tehano succeeds because Wier has a grand vision rooted in a 
jeweler’s particularity that encompasses both the tragic and the 
comic. This broadness of vision sustains Wier’s daring imagination, 
which allows us to fully inhabit the disparate lives of his characters.
—Los Angeles Times

"The action in Wier’s novel is so good, the characters so vivid and 
the scenery so memorable, that the pages just whip by."—Baton 
Rouge Advocate

"This is a novel that sticks. It has the smell of lived life, the 
rattle of a world long gone. It rouses and compels, not least 
because Wier has a true yarn, outsize and grand, to tell. His is 
an American West fetched up whole and mythic, more dust and 
wind and high sky and idiom per page than anything this side 
of Larry McMurtry."—Lee K. Abbott

"Allen Wier has imagined a way to express an epic vision of the 
American experiment at its crossroads. From the antebellum era, 
through the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wier's sizable cast of 
characters—African American freedmen and slaves, Native 
American warriors and their women, Confederate and Union 
veterans, immigrants, and citizens high and low—pitch up in 
Comanche territory in Texas, enacting their destinies. Wier has 
breathed new life into representative American men and women in 
a style alive with realism, soaring with lyricism, and vibrant with 
humor. His understanding of the Native American and the African 
American experience is stunningly uncanny."—David Madden

"An extraordinary accomplishment: a novel of Tolstoyan scope. 
Here is the palpable savage young country itself, and its people 
with all their loves, fears, passions, hopes, dreams, and 
sufferings—human souls searingly brought forth from the swirl of 
history. It is a great work of fictive Art, and to my mind perhaps the 
finest achievement of my generation, no less."—Richard Bausch


With vivid and authentic detail and a storm of narrative power, 
Allen Wier's Tehano brings together historical and imagined 
events, giving readers a sense of the final years of the nineteenth 
century—a time both brutal and majestic—that spawned our present 
time. The disparate narrative skeins are collected through the 
efforts of Gideon Jones, a westering picaro who sets down his 
adventures and those of the people whose path his crosses.

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ALLEN WIER has published three other novels, Blanco, Departing 
as Air, and A Place for Outlaws, and a story collection, Things 
About to Disappear. A former Guggenheim and Dobie-Paisano 
Fellow, Wier has had fiction, essays, and reviews appear in such 
venues as Southern Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and The 
New York Times. A Texas native, Wier currently teaches in the 
writing program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.



What people are saying about this book

"A wonderful Texas novel. A genuine masterpiece. A magnificent 
work."—George Garrett

"Tehano is sweetly antiquarian and hip at the same time. I lived 
it and loved it. Many Comanche and Texan hats off to Allen Wier."
—Barry Hannah