Santa Ynez, A Novel

Cole Clay, raised a cowboy on California’s Central Coast, is on the cusp of a new life. A rich wife and a rewarding new job promise an escape from being “land rich and cash poor.” When the death of a young cowboy implicates his family, Cole is immersed in a hot cauldron of family conflict and forced to make a choice that will alter the course of his life. Santa Ynez is a modern western saga but, at a deeper level, it’s a meditation on what divides us as a people and whether traditional values can survive the onslaught of modernity.

"Dennis Roy Patrick’s Santa Ynez is a wonderfully told story. Rooted in what the Irish poet W.B.Yeats called “one dear perpetual place,” it finds in the particulars of a contemporary California cattle ranch the universal themes that haunt our age: what progress really means, what’s lost, what’s gained, what endures. Deeply reflective but never ponderous, romantic but never saccharine–the saga of the passionate bond between a land and its people–Santa Ynez presents us with a part of America that we lose at our peril. This is a novel to be read, and savored, and read again. I enjoyed it from first page to last."

—Peter Quinn, author of The Banished Children of Eve and the Fintan Dunn trilogy; winner of the American Book Award.

© 2023 Doeg Hill Partners, LLC (Ebook): 9798986479118

Release date

Ebook: January 13, 2023