Three lives, 100 years, one Western ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the In 2024, Nina''s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old energy bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise--a town of the Old West that is strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making. In 2003, Sunrise’s golden boy Coll begins to direct town''s annual historical reenactment when he is linked with a scandalous incident at a local bar. And when an upstart author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city--and himself. In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy''s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence? These three are strangers, separated by time. But Sunrise has secrets which lie in waiting like gunpowder: quiet, unassuming, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht''s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the places we lay claim to, and most of all, of our own lives.

Autorentext

Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction, been a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Southwest Book Award, and won for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.

Klappentext

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Three lives, one hundred years, one ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise, where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the award-winning author of *The Tiger’s Wife

**“Masterful . . . [Obreht] delightfully mashes up several genres, including Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga.”—The New York Times Book Review

“I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know.”—Liz Moore, author of The God of the Woods**

In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.

In 2003, local golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.

In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?

These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.

Leseprobe
An Incident Over Horsebone Lake
August 2024

Now you see her. From above, she’s a dark speck against darker water. Head, shoulders, occasional hands. Below, her legs are churning flashes in the green. She’s fighting the chaos of the moment, the sense that she’s been teleported into this cold horror. For now, she’s still screaming. Grabbing at empty space as her clothes continue to swell with water. Her brain is convinced that her feet will eventually find ground. They won’t—she’s almost half a mile from land, and the lake, where she’s fallen, is over four hundred feet deep. In a minute or two, she’ll realize the broad strokes of all this and slow her thrashing.

Overhead, the smoke trail the Cessna left behind is already fading. A black drape blurring faintly gray as the wind pulls it apart. It takes Nina a few seconds to tie one thing to the other: her body down here in the water, the smoke’s plunging arc up there in the sky.

No plane. There’s no plane anymore.

No fireball, either, though. No explosion. That’s important.

The dulling cold is in her. She feels as if it’s been part of her for a long time, although she can’t have been underwater for more than a few seconds.

Something—thick, cold, and living—bumps her leg, and she sets off for shore. Slow progress. She has to think about every move: the reach, the pull. She never really learned how to swim. Lied on her nannying application about having formal training in all four strokes. Her arms ache and disobey. Sometimes they fail, and she dips under. Water up her nose, and in her mouth. The roar of it in her ears. There’s no stillness anywhere.

Her shoes are like irons, pulling at her from below. She reaches down and starts to unlace one: there’s her distant, slow-motion hand, plucking at the bright green gleam of the sneaker. But then the thought of losing something to the insistent darkness of the lake fills her with panic. It would be like cutting off a piece of herself. She gives up on the laces and swims on, the flooded shoe loose now and threatening to come off with every kick.

A tendril of memory finally comes through.

Ben. Where’s Ben?

She glances around. Behind her, there’s nothing but flat blue calm, all the way to the far shore. Two miles, maybe more, of this freezing lake, bigger than it had looked through the low clouds when Ben had aimed the plunging Cessna toward it. In the distance, she can make out some bluffs, barren and black, covered in leafless trees, dead, maybe, or burned in one of the many fires Jones told her are forever ravaging these mountains.

The shore she is swimming toward doesn’t seem much livelier. A gray beach littered with driftwood that looks like the shed antlers of something huge and prehistoric.

By the time her knees hit ground, she can’t even imagine trying to stand. She crawls the rest of the way, drops down into the muck, and lies there. The close-up world appears in extraordinary high definition: coarse flecks of gold and brick-red among the sand grains, a pip of something incredibly green that was once, perhaps, part of a bottle.

Everything around her has already fallen into silence. No plane engine. No water in her ears. No birds. Just her own breath scraping in and out, and the immense indifference of the world going back to what it had been before the sputtering Ce…