Sara Donati · 2023 · overland
Sara Donati's 2023 novel, returning to the Bonner descendants. In 1857 a New York-trained midwife takes a post in the New Mexico Territory, travelling west by rail, river and wagon to a Santa Fe of three languages and several kinds of law. She arrives to find the work harder, the politics uglier and the country stranger than anything the city prepared her for.
- 1New York
Carrie Ballentyne, trained as a nurse-midwife in New York and connected to the Bonner family by blood and obligation, accepts a post in the New Mexico Territory and leaves a city where her prospects have quietly run out.
- 2St Louis
West by rail and river to St Louis, the hinge of the whole continent, where everything bound for the plains is bought, packed and argued over - and where a woman travelling alone attracts a good deal of comment.
- 3Independence
At Independence on the Missouri the wagons form up for the Santa Fe Trail, and the journey stops being a matter of tickets and becomes one of oxen, water, weather and the company you happen to be travelling with.
- 4Santa Fe
Eight hundred miles later she comes into Santa Fe, an old Spanish town lately made American, where the medicine she practises, the languages she does not speak and the territory's raw politics all collide at once.