Against the flamboyant background of the Golden Spread, the oil-rich Panhandle of the late 1950s, Al Dewlen has poised a full-scale and truly original novel of one Texas family the Mungers of Amarillo. The six Munger siblings are the heirs of hard-drinking, hardscrabble farmer Cecil Munger, who in one generation brought his family from Dust Bowl poverty to unfathomable wealth. Sitting as directors of the several corporations in which their wealth resides, five of the siblings Spain, Texas, Laska, China, and Bethel struggle to balance their past with their present, their place in society, and...