Though it's a long way from her Serbian birthplace, for the second time in four novels, Téa Obreht has chosen to set a story in the American West --- in this case Wyoming, where she makes her home. With effortlessly elegant style, the author of THE TIGER'S WIFE has created an intricate but accessible story blending an account of wilderness survival with an intriguing tale from the 19th-century West that navigates the sometimes indistinct borderline between fact and myth.

SUNRISE's frame focuses on Nina Terzić, whose fiancé, Ben Robbins, pushes her out of the Cessna he's piloting and into a Wyoming mountain lake before their plane crashes following a bird strike on a late August day in 2024. Nina is a 24-year-old art history graduate student who works as a nanny for a well-to-do but eccentric Manhattan family. Spared any serious injury, after she swims to shore, she has ample time to ponder Ben's fate, their checkered relationship and her own isolation. She hoards her dwindling supply of protein bars and attempts, without any discernible wilderness skills, to figure out a path back to civilization.

"SUNRISE succeeds exceptionally well in triggering the 'vivid and continuous dream' that the late novelist and teacher John Gardner argued was the goal of the best fiction.... Anyone entering this richly imagined world will feel a tinge of regret when the time comes to leave it."

In the course of her wanderings, Nina finds her way to what's left of a “wretched little town,” including the skeletal remains of a hotel and bar, where a stable becomes her temporary home. It's in that stable that she makes a shocking discovery, along with a binder containing a novel written by “LT Hawley.” The book is about a town called Sunrise, the place where she's taken refuge, and the exploits of a “noble gunslinger,” Anton Vargas, who once lived there. She begins to read.

Roughly one-third of SUNRISE comprises Hawley's fictional account of Vargas’ return to the town in 1902, 20 years after he and three companions --- Fred Kipley, the deputy marshal and local newspaper editor; Preacher Maclean, the town doctor; and Sadie Wilkins, who operates the town's hotel --- engage in a dramatic confrontation with a notorious local gang in a nearby town. It earns them the title of the “Greyrock Four” and considerable fame that's amplified by a pulp novel and a stage play in which Vargas sometimes stars. He's back in town with the knowledge that he's dying of cancer and the hope that he can reconnect with Preacher, from whom he's been estranged for two decades. 

But Obreht isn't content to leave the reader with only these two engrossing plots, either of which easily could have been expanded into a stand-alone novel. She creates yet a third, involving a young man named Coll Yard, who has dropped out of college and returned to help his family after his father's heart attack three years earlier. He serves as head of the local historical society and organizer of Old Sunrise Days, an event that includes a reenactment of the Greyrock Four's heroism, and he's been hard at work seeking a state historic designation for the ghost town. LT (Louise) Hawley has shared her unfinished novel with him and has traveled to Wyoming in 2003 to make her first visit to Sunrise. But both her book and an old recording she shares with Coll pose an uncomfortable challenge to some of his cherished beliefs about Vargas and his companions.

In an interview with the Michigan Quarterly Review following the publication of her second novel, INLAND, in 2019, Obreht credited some of her fascination with the Western genre to her visits to small-town museums in the Mountain West. “The people who worked at the local Historical Societies are just unbelievable history buffs,” she recalls. “They’ll tell you the most incredible stories that are known to, like, ten people in town. I love obscure anecdotes and unresolved fragments of this chaotic narrative of history that dwell in these marginalized spaces.”

That spirit clearly infuses SUNRISE, but Obreht's most impressive achievement is that, unlike many novels employing a framing structure, each of this story's elements feels equally captivating. As eager as one may be to learn the outcome of Nina's encounter with the wilds of Wyoming, that desire never overcomes one's engagement in the tragic story of Anton Vargas or in the eerie atmosphere that surrounds Coll and Louise's visit to Sunrise. Whether Obreht is inhabiting the point of view of Nina, Vargas or Coll, she invests each of these characters with a believable interior life.

Obreht delivers all of this in prose that succeeds in propelling all three of these plots forward while frequently turning a phrase that encourages one to linger. For example, on the morning of a wedding for which his mother has baked the cake, Coll sees Mira, one of the bridesmaids and an object of his romantic interest: “She was an astonishment floating from one end of the porch to the other in a dress so yellow his beleaguered brain smelled lemons when he saw it.” Obreht's descriptions of the lovely but unforgiving world in which Nina finds herself skillfully juxtapose the beauty of her surroundings with her rising anxiety as her food supply inexorably diminishes and each late summer morning grows just a bit chillier.

SUNRISE succeeds exceptionally well in triggering the “vivid and continuous dream” that the late novelist and teacher John Gardner argued was the goal of the best fiction. Its characters are well drawn, and whether they're acting in the contemporary Old West or its historic version, Obreht makes their struggles both plausible and engaging. Anyone entering this richly imagined world will feel a tinge of regret when the time comes to leave it.