Lyrical, visionary, and unforgettable.
Set amid the rugged beauty of Wyoming’s Black Hills, Carrier’s richly contemplative book blends literary realism, spiritual mystery, and speculative fiction into an emotionally resonant story about grief, healing, and human transformation. The novel centers on herbal healer Senga Munro, whose disappearance leaves a circle of friends and loved ones struggling to understand what became of her. Among them is Gabe Belizaire, a thoughtful former bull rider and writer from Louisiana now living on a Wyoming ranch, where the rhythms of rural life continue despite profound personal loss.
The mystery deepens after Senga’s herbal notebook is discovered inside a nineteenth-century Cheyenne medicine bundle. Its pages describe her captivity in an underground cave, her awakening among the Cheyenne of another era, and her eventual return through a space-time portal near Devils Tower. Yet the world she reenters has been irrevocably altered by “The Phenomenon,” a global evolutionary shift in consciousness that has transformed society’s values and emotional priorities. Carrier handles these speculative elements with remarkable restraint, grounding them in intimate relationships and emotional truth rather than spectacle.
The novel moves fluidly among perspectives and generations, introducing a memorable cast of characters shaped by longing, memory, and resilience. Caroline Strickland, newly widowed and quietly unraveling beneath the weight of grief, emerges as one of the book’s emotional anchors, while scenes involving Sebastian, an aging Danish man haunted by his love for Senga, lend the narrative additional tenderness and melancholy. Throughout, Carrier’s prose remains attentive to landscape and atmosphere: cottonwoods rattling in cold wind, horses shifting in barn aisles, distant ridgelines darkening beneath snow-heavy skies. Wyoming itself becomes a living presence within the story.
What makes the book especially compelling is its belief in attentiveness as a form of healing. Carrier explores friendship, aging, race, spirituality, and ecological consciousness with unusual compassion and patience, allowing philosophical reflections to emerge naturally from character and place. The story unfolds gradually, less concerned with plot mechanics than with emotional accumulation and spiritual awakening. By the time Senga celebrates her fiftieth birthday among old friends, revelations that might seem improbable elsewhere feel wholly earned here. Thoughtful, haunting, and deeply humane, this is a quietly daring story that asks whether humanity is capable not only of surviving catastrophe, but of evolving beyond it.
Fans of The Overstory by Richard Powers and The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell will find much to admire in Carrier’s haunting blend of spiritual inquiry, literary depth, and speculative imagination.
***
Braeburn Croft and Press
Pub date May 18, 2026
ISBN 978-1-7340437-5-4
Print length 397 pages
Price $7.95 Kindle edition
