Blue Horse Dreaming

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‘I will not live among you,’ says Abigail Buwell when she is taken from her life among the savages and returned, against her will, to ‘civilisation’ – the last military outpost on the frontier’s hostile edge. Only Major Robert Cutter, the commander into whose hands she is delivered, hears her words. Abigail views her new life as captivity. Alone and pregnant, she is watched over night and day by the beloved blue roan horse on which she rode back. In the fort around her, a lack of supplies, illness and intense isolation begin to wreak havoc on the minds and bodies of those stranded in this distant place. Major Cutter, meanwhile, crushed by war and its aftermath, struggles to free himself of the doubts – and a boy – that haunt him. As Abigail’s protest and the garrison’s descent continue, it seems that his fate and that of his silent charge are increasingly bound together. Set in the aftermath of the American Civil War but speaking as much of our times as of those, Blue Horse Dreaming is stark, haunting and told in exquisite prose.

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Melanie Wallace was born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, and now lives with her husband in Myloi, an agrarian village below the Ohi mountain range in Greece, and in Athens. Her novel The Housekeeper was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.