The River Wife by Jonis Agee

The River Wife by Jonis Agee

From acclaimed novelist Jonis Agee, whom The New York Times Book Review called a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape, The River Wife is a sweeping, panoramic story that ranges from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811 through the Civil War to the bootlegging days of the 1930s.

When the earthquake brings Annie Lark's Missouri house down on top of her, she finds herself pinned under the massive roof beam, facing certain death. Rescued by French fur trapper Jacques Ducharme, Annie learns to love the strong, brooding man and resolves to live out her days as his River Wife.

More than a century later, in 1930, Hedie Rails comes to Jacques' Landing to marry Clement Ducharme, a direct descendant of the fur trapper and river pirate, and the young couple begin their life together in the very house Jacques built for Annie so long ago. When, night after late night, mysterious phone calls take Clement from their home, a pregnant Hedie finds comfort in Annie's leather-bound journals. But as she reads of the sinister dealings and horrendous misunderstandings that spelled out tragedy for the rescued bride, Hedie fears that her own life is paralleling Annie's, and that history is repeating itself with Jacques' kin.

Among the family's papers, Hedie encounters three other strong-willed women who helped shape Jacques Ducharme's life-Omah, the freed slave who took her place beside him as a river raider; his second wife, Laura, who loved money more than the man she married; and Laura and Jacques' daughter, Maddie, a fiery beauty with a nearly uncontrollable appetite for love. Their stories, together with Annie's, weave a haunting tale of this mysterious, seductive, and ultimately dangerous man, a man whose hand stretched over generations of women at a bend in the river where fate and desire collide.

The River Wife richly evokes the nineteenth-century South at a time when lives changed with the turn of a card or the flash of a knife. Jonis Agee vividly portrays a lineage of love and heartbreak, passion and deceit, as each river wife comes to discover that blind devotion cannot keep the truth at bay, nor the past from haunting the present.

Jonis Agee is an award-winning author whose works include Sweet Eyes and Odd Angels, both of which were named New York Times Notable Books. Agee grew up in Nebraska but spent her summers in Missouri on the Lake of the Ozarks. She was a long-time professor at the College of St. Catherine. In St. Catherine's, Paul, Minnesota, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, are both home to the University of Michigan. She returned to Nebraska after a long absence, where she now lives on an acreage along the Missouri River north of Omaha and teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780812977196
ISBN 10	081297719X
Title	The River Wife
Author	Jonis Agee
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2008-05-27
Number of pages	432
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.