The Sheep Queen

An epic family saga set on the sprawling, beautiful ranches of the American West, from the author of The Power of the Dog, "a masterful novelist working at the peak of his form" (Washington Post). A Western family story at once intimate and epic, this rich, compelling, emotionally charged novel tells the story of the Sweringen family of Idaho: Emma, the matriarch, known as the Sheep Queen ("surely one of the most fascinating characters in current fiction" —Publishers Weekly); the daughter who disappoints her; the grandson who adores her; and the granddaughter, given up for adoption, who spends nearly half her life finding her way back to her family. "The Sheep Queen is marvelous...Her reign has a mythic grandeur." —New York Times Book Review "A fine novel...A sense of family as anchor and root and self-definition [gives] the book its considerable strength...Savage is a writer of the first order, and he possesses in abundance the novelist's highest art — the ability to illuminate and move." —The New Yorker

Chronicles five generations of an American sheep-ranching dynasty, focusing on the beautiful daughter, Elizabeth, who threatens the family's unity and her own identity, and details the lives of Elizabeth's two husbands and her son.

In 1901, Philadelphia's celebrity female journalist stepped off a train in Blackfoot, Montana, and into a world of living legends. The miners and frontiersmen, Indians and trappers that Caroline Lockhart met there inspired this beautiful, single, strong-willed woman to live a life she had only dreamed about in what remained of the Wild West.

The queen tried to sleep by counting sheep, but the sheep just add to her problems.