Annie Dillard · 1992 · overland

Annie Dillard's only novel, and a bestseller. Settlers cross the continent by wagon in the 1850s and end up on Bellingham Bay ninety miles north of Seattle, among the Lummi and Nooksack - and the book follows three families for forty years through drownings, fires, the railroad boom and the expulsion of the Chinese.

1. 1
   Independence

   1855, and Ada and Rooney Fishburn set off by covered wagon in their early twenties for a coast neither has seen - youthful ignorance and optimism being, as one reviewer put it, their greatest assets.

2. 2
   Fort Laramie

   The plains crossing, and the book's first death - the Fishburns bury a child on the trail, which Dillard reports in the flat register she uses for everything, and which sets the tone for four hundred pages.

3. 3
   The Columbia

   Down into Oregon on the emigrant road, and then north instead of settling - because the land that is left is up beyond the Sound, ninety miles above Seattle and just short of the British line.

4. 4
   Whatcom

   A rough settlement on Bellingham Bay among the Lummi and Nooksack, where hermits pay debts in sockeye and a man lives in a cedar stump - Dillard spent five years here researching and read nothing published after 1883.

5. 5
   Sehome

   The coal-mine settlement next door, and the second generation: Clare Fishburn grown, the railroad coming, and Beal Obenchain deciding to tell a man he is going to kill him and then simply wait.

6. 6
   Fairhaven

   The fourth of the settlements that will merge into Bellingham - the boom, the speculators, and the expulsion of the Chinese workers, which is the event that breaks John Ireland Sharp's faith in everything.