THIS TENDER LAND

From the acclaimed author of Ordinary Grace, a powerful novel about an orphan's life-changing adventures traveling down The Gilead and Mississippi rivers during the Great Depression.

Located on the banks of the Gilead River in Minnesota, Lincoln School is home to hundreds of Native American boys and girls who have been separated from their families. The only non-Native American children are orphan brothers Odie and Albert who, under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Brickman, the cruel superintendent, are constantly in trouble for misdeeds. Their best friend is Mose, a mute Native American and the strongest kid in school.

One of the only people who is kind to them is Cora Frost, a widowed teacher who is raising her little girl, Emmy, on her own. Tragedy strikes and sets off a series of events that send Odie, Albert, and Mose to flee with Emmy down the Gilead in a canoe, leaving a dead body in their wake. Soon they are wanted by the law and they know that Mrs. Brickman will stop at nothing to track them down for dark reasons of her own.

Over the course of the summer, Odie, Albert, Mose and Emmy pass by isolated farms, small towns and big cities, meeting all kinds of people from a tent revival healer, a sadistic farmer who enslaves them, to a warm and loving family living in a sprawling shanty town. They encounter the desperate, the cruel and the kind and generous and are changed.

With his signature "pitch-perfect, wonderfully evocative" (Dennis Lehane ) prose, William Kent Krueger's This Tender Land is, in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, both homely and mythic. These are children the reader won't forget and a well researched and lyrical journey through time and landscape.

William Kent Krueger is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestselling Ordinary Grace, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel, as well as eighteen Cork O'Connor novels, including Desolation Mountain and Sulfur Springs. He lives in the Twin Cities with his family.