The Removes

“The Removes is a stunning, vivid portrayal of captivity and freedom, and wars waged on the landscapes and peoples of the American frontier. Soli’s writing is so visceral and evocative one feels transported to that moment when history is forged. At once intimate and sweeping, unflinching and compassionate, The Removes is a magnificent read.”
— Vaddey Ratner, PEN/Hemingway Finalist, Author of In the Shadow of the Banyan

As the first wave of pioneers travel westward to settle the American frontier, two women discover their inner strength when their lives are irrevocably changed by the hardship of the wild west in The Removes, a historical novel from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Tatjana Soli.

Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the west, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of fifteen-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie’s husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family’s homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated―living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer. They move out to the territories with the U.S. Army, where Libbie is challenged daily and her worldview expanded: the pampered daughter of a small-town judge, she transforms into a daring camp follower. But when what Anne and Libbie have come to know―self-reliance, freedom, danger―is suddenly altered through tragedy and loss, they realize how indelibly shaped they are by life on the treacherous, extraordinary American plains.

With taut, suspenseful writing, Tatjana Soli tells the exhilarating stories of Libbie and Anne, who have grown like weeds into women unwilling to be restrained by the strictures governing nineteenth-century society. The Removes is a powerful, transporting novel about the addictive intensity and freedom of the American frontier.

Praise

Some Love from Darien Library (Watch)

“Reads like a complex, historical, moving painting with gorgeous brushstrokes for sentences and paragraphs.”
— Chautauqua Prize Committee

True West names The Removes Best Fiction of 2018:
“The Removes is a bold, adventuresome novel of the post-Civil War Western Indian Wars. Told through the experiences of two female antagonists, George Armstrong Custer’s wife, Libbie Custer, and Cheyenne Indian abduction victim 15-year-old Kansas pioneer girl Anne Cummins, the dynamic and original narrative will enthrall readers.”

“Manifest Destiny meets our feminist moment as Soli conjures the layered lives of two woman.”
―O Magazine

“… vividly evokes the genocidal violence visited on Native Americans.”
—The New Yorker

“Thrilling.”
―POPSUGAR

“The novel has an agile energy to it, a forward momentum that propels us, along with its men and women. Soli is an impeccable storyteller…There is deep empathy in The Removes.”
—Santa Fe New Mexican

“[Soli] does not shy away from the gruesome historical details, and there are times that one can almost smell the blood in the prairie dust . . . Vivid and unsettling, this book is an engaging read”
— The Historical Novel Society

“Soli brings a new twist to the oft-told love story of Libbie and George Armstrong Custer . . . The Removes is more than a Custer tale”
— The Denver Post

“Soli honours the history she uses to tell her tale by the care she takes with her storytelling . . . She does not shy away from violence, but nor does she revel in it; most notably . . . the reader’s imagination has been well-schooled by the author’s art: the horror is more vivid for being created in the mind’s eye”
—The Economist

“Soli provides not only a fascinating story, but also clues to understand the battle that seems so inexplicable from our 21st-century
perspectives, along with the men and women affected by it.”
—Bookreporter

“Soli honours the history she uses to tell her tale by the care she takes with her storytelling, and by the way she laces through the book documents and photographs from the era. She does not shy away from violence, but nor does she revel in it; most notably, the climactic battle is barely described. But by that point the reader’s imagination has been well-schooled by the author’s art: the horror is more vivid for being created in the mind’s eye.”
—The Economist

“Soli’s novel is both gut-wrenchingly violent and heart-wrenching, but above all, it’s an unforgettable journey of loss and hope.”
— BookPage

“Finely crafted, this moving novel viscerally depicts the brutality of the Westward Expansion and the universal quest for freedom, while reminding readers of the human cost of greed.”
—Library Journal

“Soli’s new novel focuses on General Custer, the frontier, and the Indian wars. This is a western, but a modern one—beautifully detailed and carefully researched, completely free of the questionable mythologies that sometimes characterize the genre. A vivid, sometimes harrowing, but always gripping read.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

“Soli unleashes a thrilling novel set in the violent Wild West . . . The clash of cultures is Soli’s grand theme, and here she drives home her message that the winners are no more worthy than the losers, and that “not even brotherhood was enough to safeguard people who had what others coveted.”
―Publishers Weekly

“Epic, enthralling… With visceral, vibrant language, Soli paints a stark portrait of the violence, hardship, and struggles that characterized the American West.”
— Booklist, Starred Review

“Tatjana Soli’s The Removes breathes new life into a story I thought I already knew inside out—the tale of George Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a century-old icon of American history, and exhaustively covered by Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star. Any writer entering these lists must be both bold and strong, and Soli proves herself all that, finding fresh blood in the strangely vexed, compelling romance between Custer and his wife Libbie, real pathos in the plight of captives both before and after “rescue,” and surprising sympathy for the man who wanted—fatally too much—to be a hero.”
—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising, a finalist for the National Book Award

“Tatjana Soli’s The Removes is a rousing, thoroughly engrossing novel of the Indian Wars in the tradition of the best of Western fiction. Told through the actions, suffering, and inner musings of three very different characters—the demon-ridden George A. Custer, his fervid wife Libbie, and a persevering young woman captive of the Cheyennes—The Removes tells a tale of impeccable verisimilitude that is at once a tightly interwoven narrative and a kaleidoscopic picture of the Indian Wars of the American West, from which readers will emerge with a keen appreciation of this tragic American epoch.”
—Peter Cozzens, author of The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Soli braids a beautiful and harrowing tale of Custer, his wife, and a fifteen-year-old girl held captive out on the western plains. Intimate and panoramic all at once, this is a novel of transformation and self-reliance, a book that powerfully questions what we know of women on the American frontier.”
—Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“Mesmerizing! Addictive! Unputdownable! … From start to finish this book is nothing less than spectacular.”
—Tammy Glenn-Allen of IndiCo in Oberlin, OH

“The Removes is as beautiful a novel as I’ve read in some time. It tells of the nearly unimaginable brutality of western expansion through the stories of two women living in diverse captivities: Libbie, wife of philandering General Custer, and Anne, captured as a girl by the Cheyenne. Soli’s writing is spare, lyrical, haunting and heartbreaking, and countless images from this book will stay with me forever: the harsh majesty of the plains, the “sheer animal joy” of horses running into battle, and the bravado of Custer’s long, meandering march to his ruin.”
— Elizabeth McKenzie, Author of National Book Award long-listed The Portable Veblen

“Tatjana Soli weaves a stark western landscape, a national tragedy, and intimate portrayals of two pioneer women into a poignant and powerful tapestry of identity and belonging that will break your heart. I absolutely loved The Removes.”
—Meg Waite Clayton, Langum Prize-honored author of The Race for Paris

Slideshow

A pictographic account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Chief Red Horse of the Miniconjou Sioux. The pictographs are public domain, courtesy of The Smithsonian.