Brokeback Mountain

In the summer of 1963, two young ranch hands, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, take a job herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Left alone together in the high country for months, they form a bond that neither expected and neither is ready to name.

When the season ends, both go back down to the lives they are supposed to want. Ennis marries Alma, and Jack marries Lureen. The pull between the two men does not fade, though.

Over the next twenty years, they meet on occasional fishing trips, returning to the mountain to hold onto what they found there. Rural Wyoming gives them no room to live honestly, and they cannot bring themselves to leave it. The story follows what that constraint costs their marriages, their children and the two men themselves.

The prose is spare and unsparing, and the tone is sombre rather than sentimental. It is a short story, not a novel, first published in The New Yorker in 1997 and later collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories. It can be read in one sitting, yet it carries the weight of something much longer. The ending is devastating.