L'écriture de Linda Spalding explore les complexités des cultures mondiales, examinant souvent la friction entre la vie contemporaine et les croyances traditionnelles profondément ancrées. Son œuvre se caractérise par une exploration profonde de la psyché humaine et par les tensions inhérentes qui surgissent lorsque des mondes disparates entrent en collision. Spalding crée magistralement des personnages naviguant des questions complexes d'identité et d'appartenance dans un monde où les coutumes anciennes se croisent avec les influences modernes. Sa prose est captivante, lyrique et toujours résonnante.
In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, a young Quaker father and widower, leaves his home in Pennsylvania to establish a new life. He sets out with two horses, a wagon full of belongings, his five children, a 15-year-old orphan wife, and a few land warrants for his future homestead.
Spring 1855 and Virginian farmer John Dickinson has a dangerous secret that will lead to a tragic decision. The family's riches have been wasted by his reckless brother who holds all of them hostage and, adding fuel to John's desperation, the enslaved workers have been visited by a Canadian abolitionist who pushes them to escape. One does, and his pursuit of freedom involves a dangerous quest to find his mother and child North of the border. Meanwhile, the Dickinson family become fugitives of another kind, escaping their losses in a wagon en route to a new life in the West. Confronted by hunger, fear and a near fatal river boat accident, each member of the family is tested to their limits