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From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The NY Times Book Review called “a gifted poet of this dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape,” The River Wife is a sweeping, panoramic story that ranges from the brand new Madrid earthquake of 1811 through the Civil War to the bootlegging days of the 1930s.
When the earthquake brings Annie Lark’s Missouri house down on top of her, she finds herself pinned under the massive roof beam, facing certain death. Rescued by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, Annie learns to love the strong, brooding man and resolves to reside in out her days as his “River Wife.”
More when compared to a century later, in 1930, Hedie Rails involves Jacques’ Landing to marry Clement Ducharme, a direct descendant of the fur trapper and river pirate, and the young couple begin their life together in the very house Jacques built for Annie so long ago. When, night after night time, mysterious phone calls take Clement from their house, a pregnant Hedie finds comfort in Annie’s leather-bound journals. But as she reads of the sinister dealings and horrendous misunderstandings that spelled out tragedy for the rescued bride, Hedie fears that her own life is paralleling Annie’s, and this history is repeating itself with Jacques’ kin.
Among the family’s papers, Hedie encounters three other strong-willed women who helped form Jacques Ducharme’s life–Omah, the freed slave who took her place beside him as a river raider; his second wife, Laura, who loved money more than the person she married; and Laura and Jacques’ daughter, Maddie, a fiery beauty with a almost uncontrollable appetite for love. Their stories, together with Annie’s, weave a haunting tale of the mysterious, seductive, and in the end dangerous man, a man whose hand stretched over generations of women at a bend in the river where fate and desire collide.
The River Wife richly evokes the nineteenth-century South at a time when lives changed with the turn of a card or the flash of an knife. Jonis Agee vividly portrays a lineage of love and heartbreak, passion and deceit, as each river wife involves find that blind devotion cannot keep the truth at bay, nor the past from haunting the present.
From the Hardcover edition.
