Blood to Rubies

“Deborah Hufford's debut, Blood to Rubies, is nothing short of phenomenal...It is poetic and sensual and tragic and utterly riveting. Mark my words, it is destined to be a classic.” —WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of This Tender Land & 25 other novels

“A scorching saga told with crushing urgency and rock-ribbed characters, layered between love and war. Unforgettable.” —KATHLEEN GRISSOM, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Kitchen House & Crow Mary 

AMAZON #1 Bestseller
Book of the Year
Ben Franklin Gold Medal for Historical Fiction

Blood to Rubies is the saga of injustice, love, and redemption in America's West, a frontier built on buried secrets–and sins. Blood to Rubies is about those secrets and the thin line between justice and revenge. A young frontier photographer, Frederick Cortland, goes West to escape the Civil War draft. In the Bitterroots, the ancestral home of the Nez Perce, he becomes obsessed with Sorrel, a young Irish pioneer woman he spies swimming nude in a mountain lake. There, Sorrel befriends a young tribal woman warrior named Flying Horse (based on a true character never written about), while Frederick comes to admire the young Nez Perce leader, Chief Joseph. 

Both witness Chief Joseph’s desperate struggle to save his people fighting the Army on their harrowing 1,500-mile exodus  to the Canadian border—the medicine line –and freedom. Frederick feels complicit in their demise. All their fates tangle in a ruthless convergence, wrought of harrowing and impossible choices. But heroism too. 

Blood to Rubies is critically acclaimed by many New York Times bestselling novelists and reviewers, calling it “a brilliant debut,”  “heartbreakingly beautiful,”  “a masterpiece.”

Blood to Rubies features 70 powerful b/w archival photographs by famous frontier photographers :Ansel Adams, Edward S. Curtis, William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge, E. Jane Grey, and others.