The Four Winds (Large Print / Library Binding)
Staff Reviews
Elsa Wolcott is treated as an invalid and outsider by her own uncaring family. At 25 she gets pregnant and is forced to leave her wealthy parent’s house and live on the farm belonging to the family of her new husband Rafe Martinelli. As the economy falters and dust and drought destroy the farm, Rafe deserts his wife and two young children in search of a better life in California. Amid the Great Depression, after the dust nearly kills one of her children, Elsa leaves Texas to try to find Rafe and reunite her family. Conditions go from bad to worse in California as Elsa lives in poverty among other migrant farm workers and works hard just to survive. On her own for the first time, facing unimaginable circumstances, Elsa finds herself an unlikely hero in a role in the fight for workers’ rights.
— ValerieFebruary 2021 Indie Next List
“A brilliantly woven narrative set during the Dust Bowl years on the High Plains of Texas, The Four Winds is a story of survival that inspires us to persist. Hannah extensively researched the devastation of this climatic and agricultural phenomenon and its toll on communities, which seamlessly informs the deftly woven narrative of the life of Elsa, a woman who finds that she has more tenacity and resourcefulness than she had been raised to believe — and then some.”
— Claudia Maceo, The Twig Book Shop, San Antonio, TX
Description
From Kristin Hannah, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone, comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America's most defining eras — the Great Depression.