“Rhapsodic and sensuous.” “Savage and tender.” Blood to Rubies is the scorching saga of injustice, love, and redemption in the western wilderness. A young frontier photographer goes West to escape the Civil War draft and settles in the Bitterroot Mountains, ancestral home of the Nez Perce Indians. There he becomes obsessed with a young Irish pioneer woman he spies swimming nude in a mountain lake. He comes to admire the Nez Perce and photographs the young leader, Chief Joseph, and a Nez Perce woman warrior (based on a real historical person). Their stories tangle in a ruthless convergence of fates. As he chronicles Chief Joseph’s desperate struggle to save his people and their harrowing 1,500-mile exodus to the Canadian border—the medicine line—to join Sitting Bull in freedom, he feels complicit in their demise.

Blood to Rubies has already garnered early praise from New York Times bestselling authors, calling the book “brilliant,” “heartbreakingly beautiful,” “unforgettable,” and “a riveting debut.”