Changes

|title=West of Here

|author=Jonathan Evison

|borrow=Maybe

|isbn=9781780331966

|pages=496

|publisher=Corsair

|date=January 2012

|website=http://westofherethebook.com

|video=1O7aVwf2G68

|summary=Despite occasional flashes of impressive writing, at nearly 500 pages and with too many quick jumps between time periods, this is an epic which doesn't really reach its potential.

}}

The town of Port Bonita, located on the Pacific coast of Washington State, is the setting – and almost a character itself, such is its importance – of Jonathan Evison’s newest novel. In a massively ambitious narrative, we start at the Elwha River Dam in 2006, before just two pages later being transported back into the 1880’s, to see the town’s founding. A hundred pages or so later, we’re brought back to the 21st century, then returned to the 19th, and the cuts between scenes get faster and more furious as we seem to flip forwards and backwards in time without giving us much time to catch our breath. By 2006, the Dam is about to be destroyed, and we see the effect its construction has had on the local community and how the descendants of the original characters have turned out.

The ultimate recent epic, for me, is the Danish seafaring saga, [[We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen]].

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