Sunrise

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Three lives, one hundred years, one ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise, where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the award-winning author of The Tiger’s Wife

“Masterful . . . [Obreht] delightfully mashes up several genres, including Western gothic, murder mystery and survival saga.”—The New York Times Book Review

“I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know.”—Liz Moore, author of The God of the Woods

In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.

In 2003, local golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.

In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?

These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.