THE LOST WIFE

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.