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    Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel
    Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel
    Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel
    Audiobook13 hours

    Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel

    Written by James Lee Burke

    Narrated by Will Patton

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    2015 Audie Award Finalist for Thriller/Suspense

    In his most ambitious work yet, New York Times bestseller James Lee Burke tells a classic American story through one man’s unforgettable life.

    In 1934, sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends with Weldon firing a gun, unsure whether it hit its mark.

    Ten years later, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland barely survives the Battle of the Bulge, in the process saving the lives of his sergeant, Hershel Pine, and a young Spanish prisoner of war, Rosita Lowenstein—a woman who holds the same romantic power over him as the strawberry blonde Bonnie Parker, and is equally mysterious. The three return to Texas where Weldon and Hershel get in on the ground floor of the nascent oil business.

    In just a few years’ time Weldon will spar with the jackals of the industry, rub shoulders with dangerous men, and win and lose fortunes twice over. But it is the prospect of losing his one true love that will spur his most reckless act yet—one inspired by that encounter long ago with the outlaws of his youth.

    A tender love story and pulse-pounding thriller, Wayfaring Stranger “is a sprawling historical epic full of courage and loyalty and optimism and good-heartedness that reads like an ode to the American Dream” (Benjamin Percy, Poets & Writers).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJul 15, 2014
    ISBN9781442369931
    Author

    James Lee Burke

    James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

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    Reviews for Wayfaring Stranger

    4.5/5

    161 ratings19 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I am quite a fan of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series and now, thanks to Wayfaring Stranger I shall be learning more about the Holland Family series. For those who have never read anything by James Lee Burke, I can do nothing short of heaping copious amounts of praise upon this gifted storyteller. Each books he writes is not only deeply descriptive and atmospheric, his storylines are well thought out, his characters are fully developed, so much so they tend to stay with the reader long after the book ends. Wayfaring Stranger is a brilliantly written book, as I have come to expect from James Lee Burke and I look forward to reading the rest of his Holland Family series.
    • 5/5
      "Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned is a dream written on water." I had never read anything by this author before and that was a big mistake. This was a wonderful thriller/family saga, but the best part about it was the author's use of the English language. The narrator was Weldon Holland who, when he was 16, encountered Bonnie and Clyde. This turned out to be an influential event in his life, although he thought of them as "people who had the cultural dimensions of a hangnail". Later, while fighting Nazis, Weldon and his friend Hershel Pine rescued Rosita Lowenstein from a death camp. Rosita was Jewish, and possibly also a communist, two characteristics that would eventually attract the attention of her husband Weldon's enemies. After Weldon and Hershel started an oil pipeline business they became embroiled with the dangerous Wiseheart family comprised of Dalton, his son Roy and Roy's wife Clara. Soon someone was out to destroy Weldon and would use any means available to do so. The characters in this book were so rich. My only quibble was that Rosita was probably the weakest of the characters, known mostly by her flawlessness. As Weldon put it, "I had married a Jew who was a better Christian than I". Hershel was pathetically devoted to his childlike, selfish wife Linda Gail (who was not as hapless as she originally appeared). "The Greek tragedians viewed irony, not the stars, as the agency that shaped our lives." Weldon and Hershel became rich using "machines that made the tanks that tried to kill" them. Roy was an enigmatic figure who had "everything except the approval of his father and consequently seemed to value nothing". Hershel "possessed the chivalric virtues of an Arthurian knight". Clara "seemed governed day to day by the vindictive child living inside her."I loved this book and the narration of the audiobook by Will Patton was perfection.I received a free copy of the e-book from the publisher, however I wound up buying and listening to the audiobook version.
    • 5/5
      The cover of the novel made me smile as I have a Route 66 license plate on the front of my Jeep. Reading this novel was my first introduction to the writing of James Lee Burke and it was an exhilarating experience. I enjoyed the story as it opened a series of the Holland Family Saga but whether it was a stand-alone or 1st novel in a series, the language of the story is what drew me between the novel's covers and I didn't want to ever escape.

      To say that James Lee Burke has a "way with words" cannot begin to express the atmosphere, the setting, the drama of the story, the essence of each setting, the characters, the plot from an ordinary day to the moments of suspense and conflict to the crescendos of resolution. James Lee Burke writes so that the reader becomes immersed with all of his/her senses, absorbing the visuals, the sounds, the aromas, and the flavors of every description provided. This is truly a gifted writer and I was blissfully encompassing myself in all the pages of this writing.

      Here are a few of my favorites:
      "For just a moment the world felt blown by cool breezes and was green and young again; I would have sworn the willow branches were strung with leaves that lifted and fell like a woman’s hair, and there was a smell in the air like distant rain and freshly cut watermelon.”

      "We swam in the evenings with dolphins in water that was as clear as green Jell-O, the coral reefs waving with gossamer fans, the sand white and stripped with the torpedo-shaped shadows of lemon sharks that swam harmlessly past us."

      "The location was the most beautiful stretch of terrain she had ever seen, the topography and seasons out of kilter in a way that convinced her a remarkable change was about to take place in her life. The mountains were purple in the distance, the grass long and yellow in the fields, and the earth the color of rust where it had been plowed, the irrigation ditches brimming with water that looked like coffee-stained milk. On the long slope that led up to a dead volcano were orchards of walnut and avocado trees, and at sunset the Indians built fires in the shadows and roasted ears of corn in the coals like people from an ancient time."
    • 5/5
      This is the best audiobook I heard yet from Mr Burke. Then of course there’s Will Patton as narrator!
    • 5/5
      Another trip into a world that only James Lee Burke could write. With all the richness and flavor of the Southwest World War II Nazis and plenty of bad guys. His writing has made for me a new Epic journey into another's fantasies at the age of 70!
    • 3/5
      The story started out beautifully, continued to hold me through the war story, and even after for a while. Then Mr. James Lee Burke started losing me. I could not understand why Weldon was so forgiving of evil , even as he and his wife were being destroyed. Everything started feeling like a soap opera , lots of drama between shallow characters. Grandfather and Rosita were the only ones who made any sense, the only ones who could fight without compromise. The end was so disappointing. Wayfaring Stranger would have made a great graphic novel.
    • 5/5
      It is 1934 and the Depression is bearing down when sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends as Weldon puts a bullet through the rear window of Clyde’s stolen automobile.Ten years later, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland and his sergeant, Hershel Pine, escape certain death in the Battle of the Bulge and encounter a beautiful young woman named Rosita Lowenstein hiding in a deserted extermination camp. Eventually, Weldon and Rosita fall in love and marry and, with Hershel, return to Texas to seek their fortunes.There, they enter the domain of jackals known as the oil business. They meet Roy Wiseheart—a former Marine aviator haunted with guilt for deserting his squadron leader over the South Pacific—and Roy’s wife Clara, a vicious anti-Semite who is determined to make Weldon and Rosita’s life a nightmare. It will be the frontier justice upheld by Weldon’s grandfather, Texas lawman Hackberry Holland, and the legendary antics of Bonnie and Clyde that shape Weldon’s plans for saving his family from the evil forces that lurk in peacetime America and threaten to destroy them all.
    • 5/5
      The cover of the novel made me smile as I have a Route 66 license plate on the front of my Jeep. Reading this novel was my first introduction to the writing of James Lee Burke and it was an exhilarating experience. I enjoyed the story as it opened a series of the Holland Family Saga but whether it was a stand-alone or 1st novel in a series, the language of the story is what drew me between the novel's covers and I didn't want to ever escape.

      To say that James Lee Burke has a "way with words" cannot begin to express the atmosphere, the setting, the drama of the story, the essence of each setting, the characters, the plot from an ordinary day to the moments of suspense and conflict to the crescendos of resolution. James Lee Burke writes so that the reader becomes immersed with all of his/her senses, absorbing the visuals, the sounds, the aromas, and the flavors of every description provided. This is truly a gifted writer and I was blissfully encompassing myself in all the pages of this writing.

      Here are a few of my favorites:
      "For just a moment the world felt blown by cool breezes and was green and young again; I would have sworn the willow branches were strung with leaves that lifted and fell like a woman’s hair, and there was a smell in the air like distant rain and freshly cut watermelon.”

      "We swam in the evenings with dolphins in water that was as clear as green Jell-O, the coral reefs waving with gossamer fans, the sand white and stripped with the torpedo-shaped shadows of lemon sharks that swam harmlessly past us."

      "The location was the most beautiful stretch of terrain she had ever seen, the topography and seasons out of kilter in a way that convinced her a remarkable change was about to take place in her life. The mountains were purple in the distance, the grass long and yellow in the fields, and the earth the color of rust where it had been plowed, the irrigation ditches brimming with water that looked like coffee-stained milk. On the long slope that led up to a dead volcano were orchards of walnut and avocado trees, and at sunset the Indians built fires in the shadows and roasted ears of corn in the coals like people from an ancient time."
    • 5/5
      From the opening paragraph, the reader is drawn into the time and place in which the story is set. This is fine literature set in Louisiana and Texas during a time when lawlessness rules and rich folks have power beyond measure. Burke makes the reader feel as if he is in the story and living it with our hero, Weldon. The characters are well developed -- the bad guys are really bad and the good guys have immaculate integrity. Awesome book. I want more JLB.
    • 5/5
      Awesome book. I love the depth of description that JLB extends with his writing. He is so detailed that you feel that you are there and can see everything. AND Will Patton as narrator is beyond compare. I am looking forward to the next book in this series!
    • 5/5
      This is a top class book. A real page tuner set in late Nineteen Forties America. A book I would definitely read again.
    • 5/5
      I could read James Lee Burke's prose for a very long time without ever getting bored. In fact, although I call it prose, if it wasn't for the dark nature of his books, it could be poetry. His writing sings and worms its way into your heart.This is not a Dave Robicheaux mystery and, at one point in my life, I would have felt that was a shame. Now that I have had a chance to read a few of JLB's non-Robicheaux books I find it hard to decide which I like better.Weldon Avery Holland grew up in Texas on his grandfather's ranch. In 1934 he was 16 years old and Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and two others hid out in the river bottom near the ranch house. Weldon said that Bonnie Parker was his first love but the last he saw of her was when he put a bullet through the stolen car Bonnie and Clyde were driving. That car was to play a part in a pivotal moment in Holland's life.During World War II Holland and his sergeant, Hershel Pine, escaped death during the Battle of the Bulge although almost all of their company were killed. They ended up behind enemy lines and were the first Allied soldiers to enter a concentration camp just after the guards had left. They found one survivor, Rosita Lowenstein. After making their way back to friendly forces Rosita was sent one way and Holland and Pine another. Holland couldn't forget Rosita though and he managed to find her before he shipped back to the USA. They married in Paris and Rosita went to Texas with Holland. Sergeant Pine contacted Holland about a business deal involving using Nazi welding machines to join oil and gas pipelines. Together they made a lot of money but they earned enemies doing so. Some very nasty people tried to destroy Weldon Holland, Rosita Holland and Hershel PIne. It doesn't really spoil the book to say they didn't manage to do so. How close they came is the real story.One of the things I love about JLB's writing is how he will take a pause in the action to describe a setting and you can almost see that spot. Here's an example from a time when Weldon and Rosita are trying to evade police:Thirty miles from town, a fine mist began blowing out of the south, mixing with the dust, and the sun seemed to dull over and grow cold and smaller inside its own glow. Then a shadow moved across the entirety of the landscape like a shade being pulled down on a window. I turned off on a side road and drove down to a creek bed among a grove of cottonwoods whose limbs glistened with mist and were as pointed and stark as the tips on a deer's antlers. A ribbon of red water wound its way through the bottom of the creek, and I saw raindrops splashing in it like drops of lead.Genius!
    • 3/5
      Weldon Holland is growing up in 1934 Texas at the beginning of this novel. His father left him and his mother at his grandfather's ranch. His mother is weak, his grandfather is hard, he is lonely. The most impressionable even from his youth occurs when he runs into Bonnie and Clyde and the Barrow gang hiding out on their land. The image and personality of Bonnie is something that stays with him throughout his entire life. It's almost like she becomes an ideal woman with strength and fortitude. Maybe because of the contrast with his own mother.

      From there, the book moves to him being a Lieutenant in WWII where he and a fellow soldier save a woman from an abandoned extermination camp. The fellow soldier, Hershel, becomes a lifelong friend and business partner and the woman, Rosa, becomes Weldon's wife. They all return to Texas and enter the shady business of "Big Oil". This is where the bulk of the book occurs. There is mystery, betrayal, murder...never a dull moment. It's chaotic and full of upheaval. Burke does an excellent job of keeping the pace up but not rushed.

      Listening to the audio made it a little hard to follow and keep up. However, I enjoyed Weldon and his ability to remain true to himself and his integrity. I also loved that the author kept me guessing throughout as to who was "good" and who was "bad". Characters were well-developed and complex. I also loved Burke's prose.

      Favorite quotes:
      "As I was to learn, patience and latitude, and even humility are, paradoxically, the handmaidens of wealth because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else."

      "Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you had planned was a dream written on water."

      "He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes, and motorized vehicles, and telephone wires and radios that surrounded him now....The woods in late autumn had become his private sun dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church."

      "He had become humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom."
    • 4/5
      This was my first James Lee Burke novel, and "Wayfaring Stranger" differed from my expectations about what a Texas-set thriller by an author of advanced years would be, particularly in its handling of emotion. The language of the book is unexpectedly evocative about emotion: the feelings between a grandfather and the grandson he reared himself, the feelings between men in combat, the feelings between men and women (in love and not), and the feelings between people who don't understand one another. The sentences and paragraphs tend toward the short, and the action moves very fast, almost like mid-period James Ellroy. But in its description, its frequent tenderness, and in its depiction of truly good people mixed in among the bad, it's 180 degrees away from Ellroy, whom I also admire. It's a gripping book, and because the evil being fought is personal and vicious and because the violence goes beyond the physical, I found it occasionally disturbing. Ultimately, the novel more than compensated me for that.Most of the action takes place in east Texas and Louisiana in 1946 and 1947, at a time when that part of the Gulf was first being drilled for oil. I know from his website that Burke can remember when the swamps and bayous of that area were pristine, and knows how that unique delta ecosystem, where salt water meets fresh, was raped and broken by the oil industry. Yet his hero is in the oil business and gets rich in it, largely without guilt and without blame implied via the narrative voice. That tells me a lot about Burke's generous and empathetic spirit. Burke's treatment of the second-class citizens of that era, including women, blacks, and Jews, also exceeds lip service and far exceeds the minimal sensitivity shown by many authors of his genre. Burke's women and minority characters are fully portrayed characters with their own motivations and critical parts to play. You get the sense that each of these people could be the hero of his or her own book. (I'd read it.)Don't let me give you the idea that "Wayfaring Stranger" is a liberal's fantasy or a skilled PC lecture along the lines of the later seasons of M*A*S*H. The white hats in this book are plenty tough. The grandfather in the book, the hero's hero, once knocked the outlaw John Wesley Hardin off his horse and kicked him senseless once he was on the ground. Worse treatment awaits at least one of the villains of 1947. Burke's angels hold swords and live in the real world.Recommended!
    • 3/5
      I will say right up front I did not finish this book. I read halfway before I gave up. Very promising to begin with but then spirals down into a sad, discouraging tale of our main characters sinking into despair. Maybe it ends more upbeat, but I just didn't want to take the effort to find out. I went back and reread my reports on three of his earlier works. Other than The Glass Rainbow I guess he is not the author for me. Burke is a wonderful writer ... but just too dark for my tastes.
    • 4/5
      In a departure from his Dave Robicheau detective series, James Lee Burke brings his readers a riveting historical novel. Weldon Holland's life is described in a manner that parallels many important events of the last century.As a teenager during the depression, Weldon lived at his grandfather's ranch. There, he encountered Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow who felt the backroad of the ranch would be a good place to lie low. Although they were ordered off the ranch, Weldon developed a lifelong fantasy about Bonnie and her radiant red hair.WWII found Weldon as a college graduate and new second lieutenant in action in front of the U.S. lines. His unit comes into attack from German tanks with heavy casualties. Weldon is able to rescue his sergeant, Hershel Pine who was buried under by a passing tank. As Weldon is digging Hershel out, the reader feels the drama of the unexpected enemy tanks on raw recruits.During this segment of the story, Weldon gets his first taste of anti semitism. We see what one man can achieve by taking a stance against this view and his manner in attempting to change another person's narrow view.Later, Weldon and Hershel rescue Rosita Lowenstein from underneath a number of dead bodies, killed by Germans who abandoned a concentration camp as the allied soldiers approached. Rosita and Weldon form a love that carries them for the remainder of the story.Back home, Weldon and Hershel go into business and feel the disappointment of dry oil wells and then the ecstasy when their wells begin to deliver oil. Wealth accumulates but Rosita is the daughter of a well known Communist woman in Spain and we see the manner in which communism was treated at the end of WWII.The story continues with Hershel and his wife dealing with new wealth and with his wife, Linda Gail following her dream of becoming a Hollywood actress.Burke has many themes in the story, from prejudice, to bravery and friendship. Weldon and Rosita are memorable characters, vividly portrayed and very sympathetic. Weldon is heroic in his approach as he stands alone for the things he believes and his love for Rosita.
    • 3/5
      I am a huge fan of the Dave Robicheaux novels, they are my favorite books of the many thousands I have read. I generally enjoy James Lee Burkes excursions into other worlds, and I understand he might want to be wrapping up these other series. But they, and Wayfaring Stranger in particular, lack the magic of the Robicheaux series, and often seem like very weak cousins to it, even derivative of it. I just hope he has a few more stunning sagas of Dave and Clete to share with us.
    • 5/5
      It is hard for me to describe to someone who has never read this author before, just how brilliantly he writes, how tightly constructed is this novel. He is truly a cut above the rest. From the opening paragraph, the reader is drawn into the time and place in which the story is set. From the opening chapter when a young Weldon Holland confronts Bonnie and Clyde on his grandfather's property there is an underlying tone of menace.Holland is a unique man, a man who protects those he loves, who is a master of his convictions, has a great deal of integrity and loyalty. He serves in he war and it is there we meet two other characters who are integral to this story. After the war there were two ways in which fortunes could be made, Hollywood and oil drilling. With his partner from the war Hershel Pine they start a company with machines Pine invented that weld pipeline better than anyones. Of use there are men who will stop at nothing, use whatever they can to take what is not theirs. What they do and how Holland Il react is the moral dilemma at the center of this novel.In his novel Burke has given us a man whose youth was formed from a chance meeting with some infamous outlaws, an everyday man who makes his own success, who tries not to descend to the level of those who threaten to take away everything he loves and has worked for. A wonderful new story from the masterful Burke. If you have not read this author before, give him a try.
    • 5/5
      An epic saga of one man's life from the second world war in Europe to demob with his new wife in the southwest USA.This book is well researched and well written by an experienced practitioner of the art of telling a good story.