Lone Women
by Victor LaValle
Buy on AmazonAdelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.
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"Lone Women opens with Adelaide Henry burning down her family home in early 20th century California with her parents’ corpses still inside. She makes her way to the Montana wilderness (with a steamer trunk that she guards fiercely and never unlocks) to begin a new life as a homesteader. It’s a propulsive start to a novel that claims a fast-paced plot – though I found myself gripped just as much by Adelaide’s defiant, glorious stubbornness and guarded wit. Lone Women combines elements of Western fiction, horror and magical realism, while featuring queer, POC characters inventing lives for themselves in the last years of the American frontier. It’s impossible to categorize and impossible to put down."
NPR Books We Love — 2023 · apps.npr.org
"In this gothic novel, which fuses historical fiction with horror, we follow an African American woman living as a fugitive in the American West of 1915. Expect “a prevailing atmosphere of menace, a dramatic landscape, characters isolated from society, an imperilled heroine,” says Rumaan Ali in The New York Review of Books . Lone Women has been a national bestseller and was shortlisted for several other major awards."
The Best Horror Novels: The 2024 Bram Stoker Awards · fivebooks.com