The new James Lee Burke is a gem of a book.  “I’ve waited 50 years to write this book,” says James Lee Burke about Wayfaring Stranger, his first stand-alone novel in over a decade. What he means is that some circumstances had to change before he could tell the tale as boldly as he wished. “The narrator [and protagonist] is based on my cousin, a real person and war hero. He has my cousin’s name: Weldon.” And also certain aspects of his cousin’s personality. The plot, Burke says, is based on truth.

The result of that half-century’s seasoning is a rich, resonant story that re-creates the oil and gas boom in Texas and Louisiana just after the second World War, incorporates historical persons into its texture, and transcends the thriller genre for which he’s so justly famed by inflecting the narrative with echoes of chivalric myth. Wayfaring Stranger is, by any measure, a work cementing Burke into the pantheon of fine literature-makers and is one of the best American historical novels of 2014.

Wayfaring Stranger in a signed edition of only 55 numbered copies in a special leather and marble collectors edition in November 2014.  It also carries a specially commissioned appreciation by Irish thriller writer Adrian McKinty.  He writes “For me James Lee Burke is more than just a great American writer, he is an American icon whose muscular, intelligent, laconic prose is a distillation of what is best about the American vernacular. Burke’s books have always been an unflinching critique of what America is now and an unsentimental vision of what America could have become if it had listened to the better angels of its nature”. Nearly all the run was allocated pre-publication.