"In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles in the back pages of her exercise book, thrilling to the first sparks of her own inventiveness. As she grows, she becomes one on whom nothing is lost. Not the novels an eccentric customer slips her at the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, or the indelible outline of the careening creature himself. Not the growing heaps of books in which she loses--and finds--herself....

Tom Bedford lives alone in the wilds of Montana. Distanced from his own troubled past, he rarely sees his son, Danny, who is now deployed in Iraq. Tom hasn't always been so isolated. As a boy, his mother was a rising movie star in the glitzy, enchanted world of 1960s Hollywood. She fell in love with young Tom's onscreen cowboy hero, the suave Ray Montane. Tommy and his mother lived in a glamorous, Hollywood version of the Wild West -- until a shocking...