Harlo
A new novel from Brian Petersen
Selected as a Best Indie Book of 2025 by Kirkus Review
★★★★★
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A rich portrait of a man and a town hanging by a thread, beautifully written and deeply felt.”
Chet once had it all—a stable career as a banker in Bozeman, a wife, two kids—but a painful divorce and reckless mistakes shattered his world. He lost his job, his family, and came close to losing his life. With nowhere else to go, he retreats to Harlowton, Montana, and the familiar landscapes of his troubled youth, in the very community he once fled.
When a new woman enters Chet’s life in Harlowton, she doesn’t offer a fairy-tale reprieve. Instead, she unsettles his expectations, forcing him to reckon with the troubled past he tried to leave behind, including an abusive father. This is not a tale of neat redemption or community healing. It’s an unvarnished portrait of human resilience, raw determination, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from living in a place where survival is never guaranteed.
Praise for Harlo
★★★★★
Kirkus Review 100 Best Indie Books of 2025
Petersen’s yarn feels like a sagebrush-flavored John Updike novel. It evokes the vast landscape of Montana cattle country, where even a banker must contend with winds and hailstorms, glittering but treacherous trout streams, and corrals knee-deep in manure…The result is a superb modern Western, full of evocative detail and hard-bitten wisdom. —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★★★★★
Once again, Brian Petersen has crafted a taut, intelligent novel populated with flesh-and-blood characters who navigate the high stakes and low treachery, the boozy cowboy raunch and the smug Armani-clad pomp jockeying behind the dusty facades of a small-town American main street. —Steven Finney, writer, editor, translator, University of North Dakota
★★★★★
With an art lover’s eye and a deep feeling for the people of the West, Petersen draws on muses and mentors to tell a story of money and land, cowboys and gunsels, lust and loss in Chet Norem’s town of Harlo, Montana. The tragicomic rompings of Chet’s world stomach-churning fights and doubt, the disappointment and solace he finds in the evolving West—make a full-force tale, and Petersen has wrapped the players in his heartcloth. —Greg Booth, Rancher and Quarter Horse breeder in Minnesota
Also by the author
Vanish
Tribal sovereignty. White man’s laws. Indian/white affinity and antipathy. The Bakken Oilfield boom. It’s amidst this backdrop that Ted Rudiman, the town of Vanish’s mortician, finds his version success, along with the unexpected renewal of passions for an old flame.
Reviews
★★★★★
A son of the high plains and all their gusts and crosswinds, Brian Petersen is ever close to his home country, and so intrigued as to make distance enough see it. VANISH is no ode, no homage, but rather a hell of a story of people and scenes told by one who knows—a North Dakota boy. I can’t wait to read it again. —Mike Burbach, editor, St. Paul Pioneer Press
★★★★★
This is high adventure with low undertones and a rare peek at how it all mixes up here in the Great Plains. VANISH is solid, literary and entertaining. —Lauren Donovan, writer, Bismarck Tribune; historian and author of Prairie Churches and Prairie Barns of North Dakota
Brian Petersen 