The Lost Wife: A novel

Description

Drawn partly from a true story, a searing, totally immersive novel about a devastating Native American revolt, and a woman caught in the middle of the conflict. In the summer of 1855, Sarah Brinton abandons her husband and child to make the long and difficult journey to Minnesota, where she will meet a childhood friend. Arriving at a small frontier post on the edge of the prairie, she discovers that her friend has died of cholera. Without work or money or friends, she quickly finds a husband who will become the resident physician at an Indian agency on the Yellow Medicine River. As one of the earliest settlers in the area, Sarah anticipates unease and hardship, but instead finds acceptance and kinship with the Sioux women who live on the nearby reservation. She learns to speak their language, nourishing a companionship with them which far exceeds that which she shares with her strange and distant husband. An endless flow of White settlers are clearing the forests and claiming land. The government has yet to pay the Sioux the annuities awarded them each July for the sale of the land, and starvation and disease begin to decimate the Sioux community. What inevitably and tragically follows is the Sioux Uprising of 1862. While seeking safety at a nearby fort, Sarah and her two young children are abducted by Sioux warriors. They are unexpectedly kept safe by one of the men, who protects them until their rescue six weeks later by federal troops. Because of her sympathy for the Sioux, Sarah has become an outcast, falsely accused of marriage with her Native American captor. Vilified by the whites and despised by her husband, she is lost to both worlds. Intimate, raw, compelling, and brilliantly subversive, Susanna Moore explores the history of Native American suffering and the rapacious settlement of the Western frontier.

Susanna Moore is the author of several novels, including In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, and The Whiteness of Bones, and four books of nonfiction. She lives in New York City.

"Her writing is so precise and perceptive, so disturbing, frightening and erotic all at once . . . this profoundly clever woman with her life in her hands." -Lucie Whitehouse, author of Before We Met "Susanna Moore belongs to a small class of writers whose work performs the paradoxical miracle of giving solace by offering none." -The Writer "Based partly on a woman's account of her abduction along with her children during the Sioux Uprising in 1862, Moore's novel is a tense, absorbing tale of adversity and survival. . . . Moore has imagined a brave, perceptive woman with no illusions about the hypocrisy of those who proclaim themselves civilized. . . . A devastating tale rendered with restrained serenity." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review "[A] compelling tale of survival, loyalty and exploitation." -The Bookseller (UK)