In 1838, 13,000 Cherokee were forced from their land to walk 900 miles along the "Trail of Tears" to present-day Oklahoma. This "illuminating and challenging chronicle of loss, despair, and regeneration" ("Washington Post Book World") brings this ordeal to life via the haunting voices of a young Cherokee woman, her husband, and a host of others--Cherokee and white, soldier and missionary, parent and child, the living and the dead.
In a novel that "retains the complexity, immediacy, and indirection of a poem," Glancy brings to life the Cherokees' 900-mile forced removal to Oklahoma in 1838 and gives us "a powerful witness to one of the most shameful episodes in american history" (Los Angeles Times).