Tributary. Barbara K. Richardson

      Praise for Tributary

      “You’ll love resolute Clair Martin, the equal of any man —or religion. Clair’s strength and survival are the heritage of western women.” —Sandra Dallas, author of True Sisters

      “Seldom does a novel come along that is as beautifully written and emotionally honest as Tributary. Barbara K. Richardson captures the grandeur and harshness of the Old West in a young woman’s struggle to find a home and a family without losing herself. A lyrical and haunting story not to be missed.”—Margaret Coel, author of Buffalo Bill’s Dead Now

      “Tributary is a novel whose characters and time are so well inhabited, whose landscapes are so lovingly evoked, we wonder if Richardson is not speaking to us directly from the late 19th century, from a high bench above the Great Salt Lake. The language and writing are surefooted and fresh and often startling the way the best poetry can be startling. Richardson is a new American voice worth listening to.” —Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars

      “Just when Tributary seemed like a story rich enough for an entire novel—an account of a feisty young Mormon woman in the 1860s—it turned into a story set in the South, and then another in the West. In the end, Barbara Richardson’s deceptively simple book is nothing less than an epic. —Jesse Kornbluth/Headbutler

      “Tributary is a remarkable odyssey of the American West, told in one of the most clear-sighted, unjudging, and original voices I’ve come across in years.” — Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses

      “This is a gorgeous novel…. Tributary takes the incomplete history and mythos of the West to task, and instead shows us some of the far more interesting and unexplored stories of American West—Mormonism, racism, women who don’t need marriage or men. Beautifully written and engaging, this is a story of one woman and her refusal to cave into societal norms in order to seek her own difficult and inspired path.” —Laura Pritchett, author of Sky Bridge

      “From polygamist Mormon desert settlements to the yellow fever-plagued Gulf to an Idaho sheep ranch, Richardson evokes the 19th Century West and the human heart in all their complexity.” —Barbara Wright, author of Plain Language

      “I’ve been hungering for a book like this since I finished Lonesome Dove—a tale of the Old West big enough to crawl into completely, full of magnetic characters, unspeakable dangers, and beautiful language…. Tributary is the story of a ragtag group of frontier survivors. There is an exiled Mormon prophet who lives in a cave and a truth-telling black man married to a Shoshone medicine woman. They are constellated around Clair, whose disappeared parents and independent heart lead her from a joyless Mormon childhood to New Orleans and back to Utah’s sheepherding outback…. It’s a big hot fudge sundae of a book—you wolf it down, and then you regret it’s gone. I loved it.” —Lisa Jones, author of Broken: A Love Story