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"In the Somme Valley a British soldier teaches his fellows to hide cigarette coals inside their mouths. Half a world away, a war-ruined photographer drinks in a bar beneath a Colorado butchery, blood dripping from the floorboards into ashtrays. Gutierrez writes with a metaphorical gift and fine hand of an age of war and upheaval where anarchists, coal barons, Pinkertons, corrupt police, broken idealists, and broken families fight to claim history's muddied field. . . . The Trench Angel announces a great new talent set to shine for a long time."—Alexander Parsons, Leaving Disneyland
"Breathes new, vivid life into the old wild west."—Mat Johnson, Pym
"Gutierrez's splendid debut bypasses the archives, whisking us straightaway into the seedy saloons, the twisting back alleys, and the trenches. . . . Like Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, this potent, lyrical novel unspools beyond its own time and lands squarely, unforgettably in our own."—Tim Horvath, Understories
Colorado, 1919. Photographer Neal Stephens, home from the War, is blackmailed by the sheriff over his secret marriage to a black woman in France. When the sheriff is murdered, Neal's investigation calls up memories of the trenches and his search for his dead wife, as he untangles the connections among the murder, the coalminers' strike, and his mysterious anarchist father.
Michael Gutierrez, MFA (fiction) and MA (history), teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill, and has published in many literary journals. The Trench Angel was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship.
Gutierrez's debut sets the industrialized murder of World War I as backdrop to the murderous industry of coal mining in the American West circa 1919.... While Gutierrez draws Paris, the Belgian war-front, and the rough-hewn frontier town with a good eye—"the sun hovered over the Rocky peaks, shading the mountain snow like a bruise"—the novel's unfiltered lens reveals war's cost to the human psyche, the amorality of concentrated wealth, the cancer of racial and ethnic hatred, and the nearly unresolvable conflict between familial loyalty and moral responsibility. By turns lyrical and brutal, Gutierrez stretches an intriguing piece of historical fiction to cover multiple themes. —Kirkus
The Trench Angel is a vivid and engaging novel and it carries a doomed, bloody and wondrous vision of the World War I trenches and the American West in the years after The Great War. It's also a ripping good yarn. —John Dalton, Heaven Lake
Awards:
The Austin Film Festival, Featured Screenplay (Drama), Semi-finalist, 2014.
The Austin Film Festival, AMC One-Hour Pilot Award, Finalist, 2013.
The James Jones First Novel Fellowship, Finalist
New York Public Library Research Fellowship, New York Public Library, 2011-2012. This award ($2500) is provided for research on a novel.
The Tusculum Review, Short Story Contest, Finalist, 2009.
Harpur Palate, John Gardner Fiction Prize, Finalist, 2009.
Pushcart Prize, Nominee, 2009
Best New American Voices, Nominee, 2006, 2008.