An East Texas–Set Western Tests the Limits of the Genre

James Wade emerged from his truck in a straw cowboy hat and a pearl-snap shirt, looking very much the part of a Hill Country writer of hard-boiled western fiction. At 37, he’s published five novels in as many years and is the youngest author to win two Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. He’d agreed to meet me at a coffeeshop in Austin to talk about his new coming-of-age novel, Narrow the Road, which follows a young man searching for his father across wild and wily East Texas of the 1930s.