She makes a marriage with a Yale-educated doctor, John Brinton, who attends to the nearby Sioux reservation and is addicted to laudanum. ‘You won’t want the river to drop too low this summer.’” It is after Maddie’s death – when Sarah must realign whatever hopes she has in another direction – that the novel truly begins.

“‘Long gone,’ he said, closing the book with a loud clap. But, as Sarah says plainly: “We were already two months behind in rent, and the landlord was relieved to be quit of us.” It’s within the walls of the asylum that she meets Maddie, a true friend.īut she will not be reunited with Maddie as soon as she arrives in Minnesota she discovers that her friend died of cholera just as she arrived, her body thrown over the side of the steamer on which she was travelling.

Her dreadful backstory is recounted early on in the novel: at 15, along with her mother – no source of comfort – she was sent to Dexter Asylum for “the insane and indigent”. Sarah is a powerful narrator, utterly devoid of self-pity, a woman who observes herself and others with ruthless honesty. That uprising culminated in the hanging of 38 Dakota – the largest mass execution in American history, authorised by President Lincoln himself. Her narrative is loosely based on Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity by Sarah Wakefield, who along with her two young children was abducted by Mdewakanton warriors during the Sioux uprising of 1862. It is a quality that connects her memoir to this new novel, a clear-eyed and riveting account of one woman’s journey into a so-called land of opportunity. In that book she demonstrated how the self can split under the weight of trauma: that as suffering is endured, some part of the sufferer is able to observe the awful events as if from afar. Three years ago she published a striking memoir, Miss Aluminum, revealing in restrained yet electric prose the hardships of a brutal childhood and a seemingly glamorous young womanhood (a successful model, she worked in Hollywood and hung out with Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn). Susanna Moore remains best known for her stylish thriller In the Cut, published in 1995. Like so many other European Americans, Sarah hopes that when she arrives in Shakopee, in the Minnesota Territory, she will find not only Maddie but a new life. My mother knew, although she never did anything to stop it.” She will travel to Boston and Albany, along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, on a lake steamer to Chicago and then by wagon to Galena, on the Mississippi River.

“Everyone in the street knows Ank likes to hurt me. Her wrist is bandaged where her husband, Ank, has burned her with a soldering iron. I n June 1855, Sarah Butts flees her abusive home in Rhode Island to find her friend Maddie in the west.

The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman