Into the Wilderness
Weaving a
tapestry of fact and fiction, Sara Donati's epic novel sweeps us into
another time and place...and into the heart of a forbidden affair
between an unconventional Englishwoman and an American frontiersman.
It
is December of 1792. Elizabeth Middleton leaves her comfortable English
estate to join her family in a remote New York mountain village. It is a
place unlike any she has ever experienced. And she meets a man unlike
any she has ever encountered--a white man dressed like a Native
American, Nathaniel Bonner, known to the Mohawk people as
Between-Two-Lives. Determined to provide schooling for all the children
of the village, she soon finds herself locked in conflict with the local
slave owners as well as her own family.
Interweaving the fate of
the Mohawk Nation with the destiny of two lovers, Sara Donati's
compelling novel creates a complex, profound, passionate portrait of an
emerging America.
Dawn on a Distant Shore
In an icy,
untamed world of pristine beauty, a husband and wife are torn apart by
fate but reunited forever by a love that can't be broken....
An unforgettable love comes alive in this masterful epic of passion, treachery, and adventure....
Award-winning author Sara Donati's debut novel, Into the Wilderness,
was hailed as "one of those rare stories that let you breathe the air
of another time" (Diana Gabaldon). Now, in an eloquent blend of fact and
fiction, Donati re-creates her beloved characters from Into the Wilderness in an enthralling new tale of romance and adventure.
Elizabeth
and Nathaniel Bonner have settled into their life together at the edge
of the New-York wilderness in the winter of 1794. But soon after
Elizabeth gives birth to healthy twins, Nathaniel learns that his father
has been arrested in British Canada. Forced to leave Hidden Wolf
Mountain to help his father in Montreal, Nathaniel himself is imprisoned
and in danger of being hanged as a spy.
In a desperate bid to
save her husband, Elizabeth bundles her infants and sets out through the
snowy wilderness and across treacherous waterways on the dangerous trek
to Canada. But she soon discovers that freeing her husband will take
every ounce of her courage and inventiveness — and will threaten her
with the loss of what she loves most: her children.
Torn apart,
the Bonner's must embark on yet another perilous voyage, this time all
the way across the ocean to the heart of Scotland, where a destiny they
could never have imagined awaits them...
Lake in the Clouds
In her extraordinary novels Into the Wilderness and Dawn on a Distant Shore,
award-winning writer Sara Donati deftly captured the vast, untamed
wilderness of late-eighteenth-century New York and the trials and
triumphs of the Bonner family. Now Donati takes on a new and often
overlooked chapter in our nation’s past--and in the life of the spirited
Bonner's--as their oldest daughter, the brave and beautiful Hannah,
comes of age with a challenge that will change her forever. Masterfully
told, this passionate story is a moving tribute to a resilient,
adventurous family and a people poised at the brink of a new century.
It
is the spring of 1802, and the village of Paradise is still reeling
from the typhoid epidemic of the previous summer. Elizabeth and
Nathaniel Bonner have lost their two-year-old son, Hannah’s half brother
Robbie, but they struggle on as always: the men in the forests, the
twins Lily and Daniel in Elizabeth’s school, and Hannah as a doctor in
training, apprenticed to Richard Todd. Hannah is descended from healers
on both sides--one Scots grandmother and one Mohawk--and her reputation
as a skilled healer in her own right is growing.
After a long
night spent attending to a birth, Elizabeth and Hannah encounter an
escaped slave hiding on the mountain. She calls herself Selah Voyager,
and she is looking for Curiosity Freeman--a former slave herself, one of
the village’s wisest women and Elizabeth’s closest friend. The Bonner's
take Selah, desperately ill, to Lake in the Clouds to
care for her, and with that simple act they are drawn into the secret
life that Curiosity and Galileo Freeman and their grown children have
been leading for almost ten years. The Bonner's will do what they must to
protect the Freeman's, just as Hannah will protect her patient, who
presents more than one kind of challenge. For a bounty hunter is
afoot--Hannah’s childhood friend and first love, Liam Kirby.
While
Elizabeth and Nathaniel undertake a treacherous journey through the
endless forests to bring Selah to safety in the north, Hannah embarks on
a very different journey to New-York City, with two goals: to learn the
secrets of vaccination against smallpox, a disease that threatens
Paradise, and to find out what she can about Liam’s immediate past and
what caused him to change so drastically from the boy she once loved.
The obstacles she faces as a woman and a Mohawk make her confront
questions long avoided about her place in the world.
Those
questions follow her back to Paradise, where she finds that the medical
miracle she brings with her will not cure prejudice or superstition, nor
can it solve the problem of slavery. No sooner have the Bonner's begun
to rebound from their losses--old and new--than they find themselves
confronted by more than one old enemy in a battle that will test the
strength of their love for one another. Hannah faces the decision she
has always dreaded: will she make a life for herself in a white world,
or among her mother’s people?
Queen of Swords
It is the
late summer of 1814, and Hannah Bonner and her half brother Luke have
spent more than a year searching the islands of the Caribbean for Luke’s
wife and the man who abducted her. But Jennet’s rescue, so long in
coming, is not the resolution they’d hoped for. In the spring she had
given birth to Luke’s son, and in the summer Jennet had found herself
compelled to surrender the infant to a stranger in the hope of keeping
him safe.
To claim the child, Hannah, Luke, and Jennet must
journey first to Pensacola. There they learn a great deal about the
family that has the baby. The Poiterins are a very rich, very powerful
Creole family, totally without scruple. The matriarch of the family has
left Pensacola for New Orleans and taken the child she now claims as her
great-grandson with her.
New Orleans is a city on the brink of
war, a city where prejudice thrives and where Hannah, half Mohawk, must
tread softly. Careful plans are made as the Bonner's set out to find and
reclaim young Nathaniel Bonner. Plans that go terribly awry, isolating
them from each other in a dangerous city at the worst of times.
Sure
that all is lost, and sick unto death, Hannah finds herself in the care
of a family and a friend from her past, Dr. Paul de Guise Savard dit
Saint-d’Uzet. It is Dr. Savard and his wife who save Hannah’s life, but
Dr. Savard’s half brother who offers her real hope. Jean-Benoit Savard,
the great-grandson of French settlers, slaves, and Choctaw and Seminole
Indians, is the one man who knows the city well enough to engineer the
miracle that will reunite the Bonner's and send them home to Lake in the
Clouds. With Ben Savard’s guidance, allies are drawn from every segment
of New Orleans’s population and from Andrew Jackson’s army, now pouring
into the city in preparation for what will be the last major battle of
the War of 1812.
The Endless Forest
With a master
storyteller’s skill and a historian’s precision, Sara Donati has
delighted readers and critics alike with her bestselling novels of the
nineteenth-century New York frontier. Now she brings us The Endless Forest, set in the remote village of Paradise, where the Bonner family that readers first met in Into the Wilderness make their home.
The
spring of 1824 is a challenging one for the inhabitants of Paradise
N.Y. when a flood devastates the village. But for Nathaniel and
Elizabeth Bonner, it’s also a time of reunion as their children return
from far-off places: Lily and her husband from Italy, and Martha Kirby,
the Bonner's’ ward, from Manhattan. Although Lily is nursing her own
grief, it is Martha, fleeing a crushing humiliation, who brings with her
trouble that will reverberate in all their lives.
In the sudden
peace that follows the storm, as families struggle to rebuild, childhood
friends Martha and Daniel, Lily’s twin brother, suddenly begin to see
each other in a new light. But their growing bond is threatened when
Martha’s mother arrives back in Paradise a decade after abandoning her
daughter. Jemima Southern is a dangerous schemer who has destroyed more
than one family, and her anger touches everyone, as do her secrets. Has
Jemima come to claim her daughter–or does she have something else in
mind? Whatever happens, Martha and Daniel and all the Bonner's must stand
united against the threats to both heart and home.
Painful
secrets and hidden sorrows, joy, heartbreak, and passion follow the
Bonner's through a season of change and renewal. A rich, passionate,
multi-layered portrayal of family strength and endurance in a fascinating
place and time, The Endless Forest will be remembered long after the last page is turned.
About this Author
Rosina Lippi-Green was born on January 14, 1956 in Chicago, Illinois, a
daughter of an Italian emigrant. She has lived for long periods in the
Austrian alps, on the East coast (where she earned a PhD in linguistics
from Princeton) and Michigan. After twelve years as a tenured professor
--getting up early and staying up late to write fiction-- she took heart
in hand and left academia.
She married with Bill Green. These
days she writes full time from her home on Puget Sound, where she lives
with her husband (the Mathematician), their daughter Elizabeth (the
Girlchild), Tuck & Bunny (the puppy boys) and the Girlchld's two
cats. She divides her time between her next novel, family, friends,
television and textile arts.
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