The Lost Wife

A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • This immersive, brilliantly subversive historical novel, inspired by a true story, is “set in 1855, follows 25-year-old Sarah Browne as she…heads west to the Minnesota Territory…When the Sioux Uprising of 1862 erupts…Sarah and her children are captured, but protected by the Sioux. Sarah sympathizes with her captors, and slips into the gap between her two worlds” (TIME).

“The story has it all: the bloody hell of war…revenge, corruption, injustice. Even some romance…A vivid tale of frontier adventure and peril.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

One of our most compelling and sensual writers brings to life a devastating Native American revolt and the woman caught in the middle of the conflict in this novel about a seminal and shameful moment in America’s conquest of the West.

In the summer of 1855, Sarah Brinton abandons her husband and child to make the long and difficult journey from Rhode Island to Minnesota Territory, where she plans to reunite with a childhood friend. When she arrives at a small frontier post on the edge of the prairie without family or friends and with no prospect of work or money, she quickly remarries and has two children. Anticipating unease and hardship at the Indian Agency, where her husband Dr. John Brinton is the new resident physician, Sarah instead finds acceptance and kinship among the Sioux women at a nearby reservation.

The Sioux tribes, however, are wary of the white settlers and resent the rampant theft of their land. Promised payments by the federal government are never made, and starvation and disease soon begin to decimate their community. Tragically and inevitably, this leads to the Sioux Uprising of 1862. During the conflict, Sarah and her children are abducted by the Sioux, who protect her, but because she sympathizes with her captors, Sarah becomes an outcast to the white settlers. In the end, she is lost to both worlds.

Intimate and raw, The Lost Wife is a searing tale of the conquest of the American West.