Author(s): William Kent Krueger

Fiction

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
A magnificent novel about four orphans on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression, from the bestselling author of Ordinary Grace.

1932, Minnesota--the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.

Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will fly into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds.

With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an en­thralling, big-hearted epic.


"If you're among of the millions who raced through Where the Crawdads Sing this year and are looking for another expansive, atmospheric American saga, look to the latest from Kreuger." --Entertainment Weekly

"Long, sprawling, and utterly captivating, readers will eat up every delicious word of it." --New York Journal of Books

This is a beautifully written, soul-stirring novel that I fully escaped into. Told from young Odie’s point of view, this is the story of a journey, an odyssey of four orphaned children in the summer of 1932 as they flee the darkness at their backs. 
Odie, his brother Albert, their friend Mose and young Emmy encounter a vast range of characters and situations on their adventure towards St Louis. They are seeking home, identity, and freedom but they have the law on their heels and have fled a boarding school for Native American Indian children where abuse, terror and cruelty reign. The summer’s events are also told in hindsight as elderly Odie looks back on his life and observes both through the wisdom of the years and the eyes and heartaches of a child. The beauty and harshness of the land and its people weave in and out of their lives as they search for a place to belong, and most compelling is the friendship and love they share for one another through everything.
A mesmerising and lyrical read. Jemma