Moore (In the Cut) returns with a bracing and daring account of a woman who tries to build a new life on the American frontier. In 1855 Rhode Island, narrator Sarah flees her abusive husband for the Minnesota Territory, where she hopes to join her friend Maddie. After reaching the Erie Canal port in Albany and nearly out of money, she boards a freighter and arrives dirty and hungry in Shakopee, where she learns Maddie has died. After wondering how she'll survive in the remote trading post, she sets her sights on a hard-drinking doctor named Brinton, who is "a bit conceited" and lacks imagination but is fair-minded and relatively gentlemanly. They marry and Brinton gets a job at the Mankato Indian Agency, where Brinton learns new treatments from the Santee people on the nearby reservation and saves many of their lives. In 1862, the Agency refuses to pay the Santee annuities after swindling them out of their land, and a Mdewakanton chief mounts an uprising. Sarah is captured along with her two children. Amid horrors and depravity at the Mdewakanton camp, where trust between the white people and the Mdewakanton quickly erodes, Sarah must make difficult decisions for her survival. Despite the economy of Sarah's urgent narration, which reads like hurried diary entries, Moore finds room for many striking observations, such as the surreal nature of a massacre: "It all seemed very reasonable and orderly, the way events in dreams make sense." This is a masterwork of Americana. Agent: Emma Paterson, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Apr.)

Moore's latest historical novel is based in part on the true story and writings of Sarah Wakefield, reimagined as Sarah Brinton, who leaves an abusive marriage and her young child in Rhode Island for the Minnesota Territory in 1855. Her quick marriage to a doctor hints at the need for a woman to secure economic and social stability. When her husband becomes the resident physician for an Indian agency near the Yellow Medicine River, her growing camaraderie with the Sioux women and children sets her apart from her peers. When the government fails to deliver on its annuity commitment to the Sioux, hunger, disease, and the indifference of government representatives lead to rising anger and, ultimately, the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Sarah and her children are captured, but her good relationships with the Sioux inspire sympathetic treatment that, in turn, brands Sarah as a traitor after the revolt is suppressed. Once again, she feels lost between two worlds. Moore's powerful story dramatizes tyranny against women and brutality and injustice against Native Americans, reminding us of the many untold tragedies that shape our history.

A family is caught in a vortex of violence. 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. One August day in 1855, 25-year-old Sarah Browne flees her abusive husband in Rhode Island, headed west to meet a childhood friend in the Minnesota Territory. Her journey is long and arduous: A freight boat crawls with rats, mosquitoes cover her with bites. She is hungry, filthy, and uneasy with the freedom that she so desperately desires. She feels, she reflects, "adrift on a great river, and adrift in my mind." Finally arrived in Shakopee, she learns that her friend had died months before. Though bereft, Sarah proves herself resourceful: Soon she finds a job, and then she finds a husband: Dr. John Brinton, the town's physician. Like all of Moore's characters, including Sarah, he harbors secrets. Moore picks up Sarah's life again in 1862, when, with the couple's two children, they have moved from Shakopee to a home near the Yellow Medicine reservation, where Brinton becomes the resident doctor. As in her novel One Last Look (2003), set during the British Raj, Moore's interest is oppression: Here, of Native Americans by ruthless, bigoted Whites intent on driving them from their land or exterminating them. As Sarah forges friendships with tribal women, she becomes increasingly aware of the corruption and injustice that blight their lives. Federal agents have cheated Indians out of compensation for the sale of 24 million acres of land. Without those funds, Indians are starving and disease is rampant. Revolt is inevitable, erupting into a grisly massacre. In Sarah, Moore has imagined a brave, perceptive woman with no illusions about the hypocrisy of those who proclaim themselves civilized. Fearlessly defiant, she emerges as the moral center of Moore's compelling novel. A devastating tale rendered with restrained serenity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.