The Prospectors
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping rags-to-riches story about claiming the American Dream, following a family transformed by the Klondike Gold Rush.
“Told in glimmering prose and rich with historical detail...you can feel the grit on your hands.”—Celeste Ng
"Smart, surprising, and epic."—Chris Bohjalian
The middle daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling inferior and destitute. But when her elder sister’s husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice joins a wave of white settlers making the dangerous trek to the Klondike, thus beginning a generations-long family quest for wealth that unfolds against the icy Canadian wilderness and the booming oilfields of California.
One hundred years later, in 2015, Alice’s great-great-granddaughter Anna must grapple with moral conflict and questions of justice as she travels to the Klondike to bequeath her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation.
Bringing the Klondike and turn-of-the-century California to vivid life, Ariel Djanikian weaves an ambitious narrative of claiming the American Dream and its rippling effects across generations. Sweeping and awe-inspiring, The Prospectors is an unforgettable story of family loyalties that interrogates the often-overlooked hostilities and inequities born during the Gold Rush era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Djanikian (The Office of Mercy) returns with a thought-provoking if uneven family saga set during the Klondike Gold Rush. In 1897, Californians Ethel Berry and her husband Clarence strike gold in the Yukon Territory. Ethel's unmarried sister Alice hopes for a piece of the fortune, and leaves behind the struggling family farm to join Ethel and Clarence. In the Yukon, she cares for Ethel, still dangerously weak after a miscarriage, and though Clarence appreciates Alice's help, he resents her lack of deference and her desire for wealth of her own. One of the book's strengths is Djanikian's choice not to portray Alice as a virtuous feminist icon. She's prejudiced against Indigenous people, which fuels her mistrust of Clarence's Tlingit guide, Jim Lowell, as well as her resentment of Jim's beautiful half sister, Jane, with whom she suspects Clarence is having an affair. When some of the Berrys' gold disappears, Alice accuses the Lowells on scant evidence, and Clarence accidentally kills Jim in the resulting manhunt. In 2015, Alice's elderly grandson, Peter Bailey, attempts to give Jane Lowell's last living descendants several million dollars of the family fortune by way of restitution, against other family members' objections. Though the contemporary narrative feels thin, Alice's morally complex character and vividly evoked experiences are gripping. This offers ample rewards.
