Summer, 1855. Sarah Brinton sets out from Rhode Island, leaving an abusive husband and child behind to head west across the country, looking for a refuge where nobody knows her history - or cares to discover it.

Sarah's journey ends at a small frontier post in Minnesota Territory, on lands claimed both by white settlers and Native Americans. There she finds herself another husband, a Yale-educated doctor who serves the nearby Sioux reservation, and settles into a new life.

Her days on the edge of the prairie are idyllic if tough, as Sarah befriends and works with the Sioux women. But trouble is brewing in the territories. The Sioux tribes are wary of the white settlers and resent the rampant theft of their land. 

When the tribes take their fate into their own hands - knowing that death will be the only outcome, Sarah's loyalties are split between the Sioux and her fellow white settlers. As the conflict rages, she finds herself lost to both worlds.

The first novel in ten years from the author of In the Cut and Miss Aluminium, this is an unforgettable story about freedom and oppression, intimacy and violence, and a woman caught in the crossfire of one of the most seminal and shameful moments in American history.