In 1865 a baby-too large a baby to pass through anyone's hips-is born to a couple at the crumbling edge of Europe where the horror of pending war is already in the air. By any measure too large, our hero can develop no patience for his determined, dinky fellows, and so from the Balkan backwater of his birth and his youth as a precocious highwayman, to intrigues at Court in Vienna, the problem remains the same-he is by one means and another continually wearing out his welcome.

In this bawdy and highly original first novel by award-winning writer Matt Pavelich, Danny Savage migrates to the New World in 1899, where, after domestic problems in Louisiana, and legal and domestic problems in Butte, Montana, he finally settles in an empty, rough corner of Wyoming with his epic shrew of a wife, Stoja. In Savage's wake are spent empires, ruptured families, collateral lives that have touched and fallen away. As an American by nature not by birth, high up in the Great American Desert, Savage finds room at last to fully express himself.