The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge

From Goodreads:

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Trapping beaver, they contend daily with the threat of Indian tribes turned warlike over the white men's encroachment on their land, and other prairie foes--like the unforgiving landscape and its creatures. Hugh Glass is among the Company's finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive.

The Company's captain dispatches two of his men to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies, and to give him the respect of a proper burial. When the two men abandon him instead, taking his only means of protecting himself--including his precious gun and hatchet-- with them, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.

With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out crawling inch by inch across more than three thousand miles of uncharted American frontier, negotiating predators both human and not, the threat of starvation, and the agony of his horrific wounds. In Michael Punke's hauntingly spare and gripping prose, The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession, the human will stretched to its limits, and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution.

My thoughts:

My family started this book on a whim before we even knew it was to become a movie. We needed an audiobook for traveling, and there is was. The story is solid - it's historical fiction so what I wanted to happen in the end didn't, but if you're true to the story you can't rewrite a fact. Even my son (who is eleven) thought it was a good book. The characters are interesting is a way modern men are not, which gives the book some grit. Definitely a novel I think men would enjoy more than women due to the nature of the characterization, but overall a solid read.