Three Bluegrass Bands Get Mentioned In NY Times Best Seller Novel!

Sweet Sunny South, The Reeltime Travelers, and Open Road along with Colorado’s Front Range region all get some world-wide exposure in Peter Heller’s best-selling book, “The Dog Stars”.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world in a small town on Colorado’s Front Range, the story’s main character, Hig, survived a pandemic flu that killed 99 percent of the world’s population.

Colorado bluegrass musician and founding member of Sweet Sunny South, Bill Powers says, “Even though the book isn’t about bluegrass I still think it would interest some bluegrass fans-both having the “survivalist”(in terms of tradition surviving) mentality both figuratively and otherwise.”

Excerpt: “His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small bandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor is a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life–something like his old life–exists beyond the airport.”

The book’s author, Peter Heller, told Prescription Bluegrass, “…people all over the country are going crazy over the book. It’s about loss and wild country and the love of place and grief and redemption and fishing and killing and love–all the stuff bluegrass is about.” 

Already in just a month, the book has made the best-seller lists including the New York Times, Indie Best Seller, Amazon’s Best Book of the Month and an Oprah Book Club Pick of the Week among others.

*Excerpts used with the author’s permission.