The award-winning author of The River Wife returns with a multigenerational family saga set in the unforgiving Nebraska Sand Hills in the years following the massacre at Wounded Knee-an ambitious tale of history vengeance race guilt betrayal family and belonging filled with a vivid cast of characters shaped by violence love and a desperate loyalty to the land.
Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men women and children at Wounded Knee J.B. Bennett a white rancher and Star a young Native American woman are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.'s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: J.B.'s cunning and hard father Drum; his estranged wife Dulcinea; and his teenage sons Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds the history of the dysfunctional Bennetts and their damning secrets is revealed exposing the conflicted heart of a nation caught between past and future.
At the center of The Bones of Paradise are two remarkable women. Dulcinea returned after bitter years of self-exile yearns for redemption and the courage to mend her broken family and reclaim the land that is rightfully hers. Rose scarred by the terrible slaughters that have decimated and dislocated her people struggles to accept the death of her sister Star and refuses to rest until she is avenged.
A kaleidoscopic portrait of misfits schemers chancers and dreamers Jonis Agee's bold novel is a panorama of America at the dawn of a new century. A beautiful evocation of this magnificent blood-soaked land-its sweeping prairies seas of golden grass and sandy hills all at the mercy of two unpredictable and terrifying forces weather and lawlessness-and the durable men and women who dared to tame it. Intimate and epic The Bones of Paradise is a remarkable achievement: a mystery a tragedy a romance and an unflagging exploration of the beauty and brutality tenderness and cruelty that defined the settling of the American West.
