Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Weight of An Infinite Sky: A Novel
    The Weight of An Infinite Sky: A Novel
    The Weight of An Infinite Sky: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Weight of An Infinite Sky: A Novel

    Written by Carrie La Seur

    Narrated by James Patrick Cronin

    3/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    The critically acclaimed author of The Home Place explores the heart and mystery of Big Sky Country in this evocative and atmospheric novel of family, home, love, and responsibility inspired by William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

    The only son of a cattle rancher, Anthony Fry chafed against the expectation that he would take over the business that had belonged to his family for generations. While his ancestors planted deep roots in the unforgiving Montana soil, Anthony wanted nothing more than to leave Billings for the excitement, sophistication, and culture of city life. After college he fled to New York, hoping to turn his lifelong love of the theater into a career.

    But New York wasn’t the dream Anthony thought it would be. Now, with the unexpected death of his father, Anthony suddenly finds himself back in the place he swore he’d left behind. While the years have transformed the artistic dreamer, they’ve also changed Billings. His uncle Neal, always the black sheep of the Fry family, has become alarmingly close with Anthony’s mother, and a predatory mining company covets the Fry land.

    Anthony has always wanted out of Montana, away from his father’s suffocating expectations. Yet now that he may be freed from the burden of family legacy, he’s forced to ask himself what he truly finds important . . . answers that will ultimately decide his fate.

    In this unforgettable novel, Carrie La Seur once again captures the breathtaking beauty of the West and its people as she explores the power of family and the meaning of legacy—the burdens we inherit and those we place upon ourselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 16, 2018
    ISBN9780062395627
    Author

    Carrie La Seur

    Carrie practices energy and environmental law on behalf of farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans, and does a little writing, from an office in Billings, Montana. Her ancestors homesteaded in Montana in 1864 and survived every sort of calamity and absurdity, so the publishing industry seems pretty tame to her by comparison. Carrie’s improbable but apparently nonfiction résumé includes a degree in English and French from Bryn Mawr College, a Rhodes Scholarship, a doctorate in modern languages from Oxford University, and a Yale law degree. She has always been a writer. “The writing comes easily,” she says. “It’s what I’m always doing in the background, whatever else is going on. It’s like my resting pulse rate to be scribbling what’s happening in my head. If I didn’t, I’d be wandering the streets talking to myself. Sometimes I do that anyway.” In 2006, Carrie founded the legal nonprofit Plains Justice, which provides public interest energy and environmental legal services in the northern plains states. Carrie and Plains Justice have played a key role in halting several new coal plants, enacting clean energy reforms, and launching the Keystone XL pipeline campaign. “I’m still involved in Plains Justice, but I went back to private practice in 2012. Running a nonprofit takes a unique blend of selflessness and enough raging narcissism to think you really can change the world. The burnout rate is similar to that of telemarketers.” A licensed private pilot and committed introvert, Carrie hikes, skis, and fishes the Montana wilderness with her family in her spare time. Her work has appeared in such diverse media as Grist, Harvard Law and Policy Review, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and Salon.

    Related to The Weight of An Infinite Sky

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Top 10 Books

      Jun 16, 2023

      Top 10 Books
      1 min read

    • Article

      Also Out

      Mar 23, 2022

      We enjoyed previous Sarah Lotz books like The Three, so we were surprised that her latest looks like a simple love story. However, Amazon has IMPOSSIBLE (out now, Harper Collins) filed under “romance time travel”… A pleasure moon is the setting of Kh

      1 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 17, 2020

      Letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Steph Opitz

      Dec 17, 2018

      I put down a lot of books that didn’t do it for me, and shuffled and reshuffled my to-be-read pile to my heart’s content. It’s been liberating. The post A Year in Reading: Steph Opitz appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Oxygen

      Jul 19, 2022

      Oxygen
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Minders

      Oct 7, 2020

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author John Marrs Publisher Del Rey John Marrs’s latest near future, high-concept techno-thriller isn’t so much a sequel to The One (DNA dating app has dark secret) and Passengers (autonomous ca

      1 min read

    • Article

      On The Bookshelf

      Apr 30, 2021

      The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams Published by Chatto & Windus Price £14.99 Pages 432 ISBN 9781784743864 In a garden shed, known as the Scriptorium, lexicographers are compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme, endlessly cu

      2 min read

    • Article

      You’ll Need Me When They’re Gone: The Poems We Reach For in Grief

      Nov 14, 2019

      I am all too aware of the place contemporary poetry occupies for most people: They reach for poems when they’re in love or when they’re coping with death. The post You’ll Need Me When They’re Gone: The Poems We Reach For in Grief appeared first on Th

      9 min read

    • Article

      A DNA Test Saved My Life

      Aug 23, 2022

      A DNA Test Saved My Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      January Fiction

      Dec 14, 2021

      The Maid by Nita Prose HarperCollins, £14.99 Molly Gray, the narrator of Nita Prose’s startlingly good debut novel, is a young woman who knows her place—and who rather likes it. For “approximately four years, 13 weeks, and five days” she’s been worki

      2 min read

    • Article

      'Tombland' Unearths Plots And Tudor-era Political Intrigue

      Jan 14, 2019

      C. J. Sansom's historical mystery series features lawyer Matthew Shardlake – one of the best-drawn leading characters in the entire genre.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The True Story Behind Netflix Film The Dig: How Two Remarkable People Found The Sutton Hoo Treasure

      Jan 15, 2021

      Right now, nobody’s allowed in Room 41 at the British Museum, where the Sutton Hoo treasure sits silently in its glass cases, but once it’s open again, there’s likely to be lots more people making for those famous Anglo Saxon remains – of which the s

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Weight of An Infinite Sky

    3/5

    11 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Hamlet Saddles Up

      As Carrie La Seur references in her Acknowledgements, Hogarth Press is, over time, issuing well known authors’ modern takes on various plays of Shakespeare, among them Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (The Winter’s Tale), pretty good, and Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (The Tempest), a bit disappointing, considering it’s Atwood.

      La Seur has undertaken the task in The Weight of an Infinite Sky, loosely patterning the novel along the lines of Hamlet. The setting here is modern Montana. The prince, Anthony, is a rancher’s son, who wants to work in entertainment, rebelling against the idea he must be a rancher. Claudius is Uncle Neal, the cur, object of Anthony’s animosity, whom he suspects of killing his father. Mother Susan is Gertrude, timid rather than calculating. Dean is the old king, quite a demanding and tight-wound fellow, who while dead lives in the minds of the characters. Hilary is Ophelia, based on her history in a psychiatric institution, and her past relationship with Anthony. And since Anthony is in theater, having failed in New York, he returns to run a summer children’s theater camp. The references to Shakespearean works abound, along with more modern plays and musicals, and just music in general; it can be trying in its volume. To tie the novel even more closely to Hamlet, La Seur forgoes standard chapters in favor of five acts with scenes as subsets.

      Does it work? Not really, which is not to say it’s a bad novel, just maybe not the worthiest paean to the Bard, one who himself knew how to lift and raise up material, Hamlet included. Whereas Hamlet is a tragedy of a tormented soul, of frustrating indecision, and of bloody revenge (death toll: 9), The Weight of an Infinite Sky descends into something like a big Kumbaya moment (one apparent accidental death). Modern audiences are no different from Elizabethan playgoers, a work of revenge requires blood.

      La Seur does paint an educational picture of Montana. The rugged land, the vastness of it, come across. Even more, she portrays the people who live on the land, the ranchers and tribal people, in ways that might help coastal folks better understand them. And she, in literary terms, takes strip miners to task not only for denuding the land but for mistreating and deceiving people who only want to be left to their traditional lives living off the land. (Anyone’s who flown over strip mined mountains has witnessed firsthand how devastating these earth gougers are.)

      Probably if you intend to read the novel, you might enjoy it more by tempering your expectations on the Hamlet front.

    • 4/5
      A nice presentation of life in the plains of Montana where the historic ways of life are being challenged, by economics of ranching and the incursion of natural resource companies. The fictional story of a young man who was brought up ranching and expected to take over the family ranch and his battle over doing what he feels is his obligation is versus his love of performance arts.
    • 3/5
      This book was just okay - while well-written I felt it was very slow moving. I also felt like I needed more of a background story for Anthony and his family. I won an ARC of this book from Goodreads.