Stephen Harrigan, longtime writer for “Texas Monthly,” is a novelist, journalist, historian and screenwriter. Harrigan has devoted much of his life to exploring and explaining Texas, ever since his family crossed the Red River from Oklahoma in 1953.

“Big Wonderful Thing” invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, “New York Times” best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea.

It’s a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, sprawling story of Texas.