Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

TO WRITE like Annie Proulx is to stretch your fingers into heaven. In her haunting short story Brokeback Mountain she expresses joy with the simple words: He thought he d never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon. The story

TO WRITE like Annie Proulx is to stretch your fingers into heaven. In her haunting short story Brokeback Mountain she expresses joy with the simple words: "He thought he'd never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon."

The story is spare to the point of sparse and it is fascinating to see how director Ang Lee elaborated on the bare bones for his hit film, fleshing out characters that scarcely merit a line.

The paperback Brokeback Mountain includes 10 other short stories emphasising the wild hard world of the American rancher, as far divorced from metroland and glamour as China or the Indies.

It is a land of hard labour, suppressed emotion, forbidding landscapes and tight rules, to be transgressed only at considerable risk. The wrong love here must definitely never speak its name.

Thanks to Ottakar's of Stevenage. 5/5