The Lost Wife

Reviews / Votes

A breathtaking tale of love and war on the 19th-century American frontier . . . Impressively taut and evocative . . . A captivating period piece that brings life on the frontier into vivid, often brutal focus through the prism of female experience . . . Although at first glance, The Lost Wife appears to be very different to Moore's most famous work, her erotically-charged thriller In the Cut, both novels are intimately concerned with sex, violence and language -- Lucy Scholes * Telegraph * A compelling tale of survival, loyalty and exploitation * The Bookseller * Moore (In the Cut) returns with a bracing and daring account of a woman who tries to build a new life on the American frontier. . . . This is a masterwork * Publishers Weekly (USA), starred review * Based partly on a woman's account of her abduction along with her children during the Sioux Uprising in 1862, Moore's novel is a tense, absorbing tale of adversity and survival . . . Moore has imagined a brave, perceptive woman with no illusions about the hypocrisy of those who proclaim themselves civilized . . . A devastating tale rendered with restrained serenity * Kirkus Reviews (USA), starred review * It's fitting that The Lost Wife . . . should directly follow Miss Aluminum, [Moore's] lustrous 2020 memoir; this book, like that one, tells the story of a woman continuously transformed by difficult relationships and sweeping changes of circumstance . . . Moore's voice is cool and sure, rich with detail * Vogue (USA) * Susanna Moore belongs to a small class of writers whose work performs the paradoxical miracle of giving solace by offering none * The Writer (USA) * Her writing is so precise and perceptive, so disturbing, frightening and erotic all at once . . . this profoundly clever woman with her life in her hands -- Lucie Whitehouse, author of Before We Met In replacing long-held legends with historic traumas, Moore's steely vision of the American west recognizes few, if any, heroes. The result is a repudiation - solemn yet stirring - of the idealized fable of the American West * Washington Post (USA) * A welcome new display of Susanna Moore's masterful approach to the undercurrent of violence that she believes runs beneath all human behaviour . . . Moore is a master of smallness. Her deceptively simple sentences are like geysers. The churning energy underneath is violent, animal and sexual. Her acrobatics in this novel reminded me of a scene from the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans that takes place on the edge of a cliff, in which choices and motivations are conveyed only with looks and gestures - no dialogue. This is how we read the sexual energy in The Lost Wife * Los Angeles Times (USA) * Moore is often called a "cult" writer. I find her to be one of the most compelling novelists alive. The Lost Wife is concise and brutally incisive . . . As ever, Susanna Moore is unflinching -- Stephanie Danler * Air Mail * Moore returns with a bracing and daring account of a woman who tries to build a new life on the American frontier . . . This is a masterwork * Publishers Weekly *