Outlawed

Anna North has written a captivating Western unlike any other, with unique rhythms, dusty lands, and characters like new friends brought in on high winds. A grand, unforgettable tale. -- Esmé Wang, author of THE COLLECTED SCHIZOPHRENIAS I'm dazzled by this feminist Western about a world in which women's worth and right to live are determined by the vagaries of fertility. Set in an alternate past, one all too similar to our today, Outlawed is terrifying, wise, tender, and thrilling. A masterpiece. Outlawed flips the script on the beloved Western genre and gives us the iconic heroine-on-the-run we deserve. Anna North is a riveting storyteller ... Reader, you are in for a real treat! -- Jenny Zhang, author of SOUR HEART Fans of Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy finally get the Western they deserve in OUTLAWED, but Anna North doesn't just reimagine a damsel-in-distress as her own savior. She plays with the promise and danger of the frontier, introducing us to an America we never knew-and one we know all too well -- Alexis Coe, author of YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST and ALICE+FREDA FOREVER A moving and invigorating complication of the Western, highlighting chosen family, love, and survival among outcasts in another American timeline. As she mines the genre for vital new stories, North beautifully shines a light on our real past and conveys a warning for the future. -- Lydia Kiesling, author of THE GOLDEN STATE This absorbing feminist western plucks the greatest conceits of the genre - the tension between individual freedom and society, the romance of the Old West marred by its inherent violence - and turns them on their heads . . . Anna North skewers the machismo traditionally championed by outlaws, and gives us instead resilient women who dress, rob and kill as men, but have all the burdens and forbearance of rejected women . . . written with careful prose that lingers lovingly on the details of convalescence, and luxuriating in its surroundings: the jackrabbits that hide behind jagged rocks, the smell of sage in Powder country . . . Outlawed shares concerns with The Handmaid's Tale and The Crucible, but is distinctly itself . . This is first a moving examination of how the marginalised find friendship in an indifferent world and only second, a western. John Wayne's characters had the luxury of self-imposed isolation; these outlaws must stick together or die * The i *