The author of the book-club classics The Kitchen House and Glory Over Everything returns with a sweeping saga inspired by the true story of Crow Mary—an indigenous woman torn between two worlds in nineteenth-century North America.
In 1872, sixteen-year-old Goes First, a Crow Native woman, marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader. He gives her the name Mary, and they set off on the long trip to his trading post in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way, she finds a fast friend in a Métis named Jeannie, makes a lifelong enemy in a wolfer named Stiller, and despite learning a dark secret of Farwell’s past, falls in love with her husband.
The winter trading season passes peacefully. Then, on the eve of their return to Montana, a group of drunken whiskey traders slaughters forty Nakota—despite Farwell’s efforts to stop them. Mary, hiding from the hail of bullets, sees the murderers, including Stiller, take five Nakota women back to their fort.
She begs Farwell to save them, and when he refuses, Mary takes two guns, creeps into the fort, and saves the women from certain death. Thus, she sets off a whirlwind of colliding cultures that brings out the worst and best in the cast of unforgettable characters and pushes the love between Farwell and Crow Mary to the breaking point.
Crow Mary sweeps across decades and the landscape of the upper West and Canada and its natural beauties while probing the intimacies of a marriage and one woman’s heart.
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“Grissom has the gift of waking up the past with fever, illuminating an aspect of American history that few know…The strength and sheer bravery of Crow Mary will stay with me for a long time.”
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Sadeqa Johnson, New York Times bestselling author