This was a literary western, recently published - at least within the last ten years. The author was a woman, from memory. The cover art was a painting - perhaps a wilderness scene with trees and hills. The painting had a European renaissance feel, more than a western feel.There are some SPOILERS in the description below.Set in the old west. The father reads an article about a land of giants, and decides he must explore the region. He leaves his daughter behind with his sister (her aunt).The novel follows the father and the daughter.The father finds a young man to guide him. I believe the land of giants was just an unexplored part of the United States - that is, they didn't travel to a new country by boat or similar. As they travel (on horseback and maybe by canoe towards the end), I think they traded the father's belongings for information - and many of the items were his dead wife's trinkets. I think the guide may have also had some of these trinkets, or maybe a top hat? The father ends up getting sick and the guide buries him.The young girl stay with her aunt on the farm. The aunt is quite strict. They have a neighbour who is a brute and begins to take undue interest in the young girl, but I don't think the aunt realises. The young girl discovers a library in town and begins to do research on the land of giants her father has gone in search of. The girl is cautious of the librarian. From memory, there is a significant altercation between the young girl and the brute - perhaps an attempted assault - but I can't quite remember.It was a really good book - so good that I read it really quickly and may have jumbled up some of these details.
When Cy Bellman, American settler and widowed father of Bess, reads in the newspaper that huge ancient bones have been discovered in a Kentucky swamp, he leaves his small Pennsylvania farm and young daughter to find out if the rumours are true: that the giant monsters are still alive, and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River.West is the story of Bellm When Cy Bellman, American settler and widowed father of Bess, reads in the newspaper that huge ancient bones have been discovered in a Kentucky swamp, he leaves his small Pennsylvania farm and young daughter to find out if the rumours are true: that the giant monsters are still alive, and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River.West is the story of Bellman's journey and of Bess, waiting at home for her father to return. Written with compassionate tenderness and magical thinking, it explores the courage of conviction, the transformative power of grief, the desire for knowledge and the pull of home, from an exceptionally talented and original British writer. It is a radiant and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie, electric monument to possibility. ...more