Sunrise: A Novel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Three lives, one hundred years, one ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise, where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the award-winning author of The Tiger’s Wife
“Masterful . . . [Obreht] delightfully mashes up several genres, including Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga.”—The New York Times Book Review
“I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know.”—Liz Moore, author of The God of the Woods
In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.
In 2003, local golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?
These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.
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Community Reviews
This novel is set in the mountains of Wyoming and is organized around three timelines. It begins in the present with Nina’s boyfriend Ben flying them to Moraine in his old Cessna. The opening pages show Ben pushing Nina out of the plane over Horsebone Lake. His plane is on descent, about to crash. She survives the fall and the freezing lake, then spends a period of time reconciling what happened and convincing herself that an unreliable friend who is supposed to meet them for dinner will report them missing. Or that Rangers will arrive. Or, maybe, her phone will find a signal.
Nina decides to investigate the area and discovers part of the plane. She knows she must accept that Ben might not have survived the crash. She also finds a ghost town, long abandoned, and wanders through the buildings. Nina discovers things that are unexplainable such as stuffed animal heads arranged in a circle on the bar’s dusty floor. Then, beside a building she sees a stack of wildflower bouquets, dried but not composted as would be expected. Maybe another town is nearby, she thinks, as someone must regularly replenish the bouquets. But for what reason?
As Nina continues to wander, she encounters a bear. Her phone dings, which scares it away, but the battery dies before she can call for help. The bear is a reminder that her meager food supply isn’t the only risk she faces in the mountains. She retreats to a barn and checks out a root cellar b where she is hiding. She discovers a coat, satchel, and a woman’s corpse, long ago deceased. At first, she flees. Then she steels herself to retrieve the coat and satchel, in which she finds a manuscript. It is titled Sunrise and tells the story about one of the town’s early hero’s, Anton Vargas. There is also a map that shows another town is within a few day’s hike.
The novel shifts to the period in which Anton Vargas was alive. After having been gone twenty years, he visits Sunrise in 1902, searching for an old friend called Preacher. No one will tell him where Preacher is, and the deputy Marshall warns him that Preacher will shoot him on sight. We are left wondering what happened when the novel shifts again to 2001 and features Colin Yard, the grandson of the man who owns the land upon which Sunrise sits. Colin organizes an annual Greyrock reenactment, the shootout that brought Vargas fame.
This book is largely a good read, but it fails to support its strong opening. Nina is a young woman—a nanny and art major—lost in a mountain wilderness alone with no means to communicate, no skills or survival equipment, and a meager food supply. It is the cusp of autumn when bears are gorging before hibernation and weather becomes cold and unpredictable. This combination is gold for a nail-biting story, but the amount of time spent with her is minimal. The 2001 period is an important segment but otherwise a “meh,” and the reveal on the Vargas-Preacher issue is disappointing as it doesn’t seem to justify the buildup. This is my perspective only. Others will likely have varied responses to this book, which, again is a good story overall.
Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing the ARC.
