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Leroy Wagner has given his heart and soul to the Bar W Ranch. He knows no other way. His wife, Caroline, born in the city, struggles with the loneliness of marriage to a man committed first to his land. When tragedy robs them of their first-born, the handsome and talented Wade, it’s all either can do to face the world. Meanwhile, their second-born, Michael, attempts to fill his brother’s shoes and their only daughter, Annie, searches for a way to reconcile her love for the Bar W with her feeling that she must flee it if she is to survive. Finally, there’s Jimmy, the Wagners’ unplanned replacement child, born too late into a world of broken hearts.
When a near-fatal accident befalls Leroy, the Wagner children must return to the Bar W to save the ranch and what remains of their family ties. Secrets are unearthed. Truths are told. Consequences are faced.
Giving voice to the contemporary American West, The Last Rancher follows one family’s quest to survive on the demanding and starkly beautiful high plains of Kansas. Doing so will require them to come together as never before to acknowledge the challenges of the present and the long and lingering shadows of the past.
What Readers Are Saying
In The Last Rancher, a stunning new novel by Robert Rebein, an emergency forces Leroy and Caroline Wagner’s grown children home to the Bar W Ranch. Crises converge on Dodge City: Annie stalls on her PhD, Michael interrupts his law practice, and Jimmy pillages his parents’ medicine cabinet. In memory lives the looming specter of Wade, son and brother who died too young. The novel intimately follows a jarring collision of selves—not to mention cars, motorbikes, and a nun. In this ranching community, lives are intertwined like barbed wire, like tree roots that run under fences and buckle the ground, unearthing secrets into the blinding prairie light. I loved this book. A family drama with humor and heart, The Last Rancher gives you the prized shotgun seat and guns the gas. You’d be wise to buckle up.
-Sarah Layden, author of Imagine Your Life Like This and Trip Through Your Wires
Dodge City, Kansas, has found its bard. His name is Robert Rebein, and his debut novel, The Last Rancher, showcases an assured new voice of the contemporary American West. Prepare to be lassoed in an unforgettable and utterly satisfying family saga.”
-Will Allison, author of What You Have Left and A Long Drive Home
Love and horses, whiskey and weed, land and money: The Last Rancher has it all. Robert Rebein has written a big-hearted literary page-turner to rival the family sagas of Richard Russo, Richard Ford, and John Irving.
-Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk
With The Last Rancher, Robert Rebein has crafted a story as timeless as storytelling itself — a patriarch in decline, a family marked by loss. By rooting these elements firmly in the Dodge City of today, though, Rebein has created a narrative unique to himself and the place. Reading The Last Rancher, I came to feel that I know these people in some elemental way and, just as importantly, know what their land means to them.
-Hozy Rossi, author of Appointment with Il Duce
Rebein’s characters are so real that I would swear I know them. He seamlessly weaves together past and present to cover decades of a Kansas family broken by tragedy. I was hooked from the first page to the last.
-Cheryl Unruh, author of Gravedigger’s Daughter: Vignettes from a Small Kansas Town and Flyover People: Life on the Ground in a Rectangular State
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I’m a novelist and essayist with a special interest in the contemporary west. My debut novel, The Last Rancher, due out in June 2024 from Meadowlark Press, is a family saga set in the ranch country around Dodge City, Kansas. Previous books of mine, including Headlights on the Prairie (2017) and Dragging Wyatt Earp (2013) have also been set in the western Kansas, where I grew up and where my family has farmed and ranched since the late 1920s.
Essays of mine have appeared in Cutbank, The Georgia Review, Ecotone, The Cream City Review, Redivider, and other journals and magazines. My first book, Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism, a study of the role of place in contemporary American fiction, was reissued in paperback in 2009. I teach creative writing at Indiana University Indianapolis (IUI). I love visiting campuses and book clubs to lead discussions, offer classes in craft, and read from my work. Those interested in hosting me for such an event should contact me directly at the email address listed below.
Robert Rebein rrebein[@]iu.edu / (317) 615-9871
