Summer, 1855. Sarah Brinton flees from Rhode Island, taking her young kid and her violent husband with her as she travels westward across the United States in search of a safe haven where nobody is aware of her past or has any interest in finding out about it.
The voyage of Sarah comes to an end in a small frontier post in the Minnesota Territory. This post is located on territories that have been staked claims to by both white settlers and Native People. There, she begins a new life with a new husband, a physician with a Yale education who works in the vicinity of a Sioux reservation, and she eventually starts a family with him.
Sarah's days on the edge of the prairie are wonderful, despite the fact that they are difficult, as she makes friends with the Sioux women and works alongside them. Nonetheless, there remains a potential for conflict in the areas. The Sioux tribes fear the white settlers and detest the widespread plunder of their territory. This has led to wariness against the settlers.
Sarah's allegiances are torn between the Sioux and those of her fellow white settlers as the various tribes decide to take matters into their own hands, knowing full well that the only possible end is their own deaths. As the battle rages on, she learns that she has become separated from both realities.
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, this is the first novel the author of In the Cut and Miss Aluminium has written in ten years, and it is the first novel she has published.