Sara Donati · 1998 · overland

Sara Donati's 1998 novel, the first of the Wilderness series. In December 1792 Elizabeth Middleton leaves an English estate for her father's village on the edge of the New York wilderness, intending to open a school. She finds a father in debt, a betrothal arranged for her, and a frontiersman the Mohawk call Between-Two-Lives - and takes to the forest rather than comply.

1. 1
   Albany

   Elizabeth Middleton lands in America and works north from Albany in the last weeks of 1792, twenty-nine, unmarried and carrying a plan to teach school in the mountains that nobody who meets her takes entirely seriously.

2. 2
   Saratoga

   The road north through Saratoga takes her into a cold unlike anything in Devon, and into a country still raw from the Revolution, where the Mohawk have lost almost everything and the land companies are moving in behind them.

3. 3
   Paradise

   At her father's village of Paradise she finds Judge Middleton financially ruined and intending to trade her to the local doctor - a marriage that would also settle the disputed ownership of the mountain above the village.

4. 4
   Hidden Wolf

   On Hidden Wolf live Nathaniel Bonner, his father and the last of a Mohawk household, and the mountain is what the argument is really about - and Elizabeth answers the arranged betrothal by running, and marrying as she chooses.

5. 5
   Barktown

   West to the Mohawk village at Barktown, where Elizabeth is taken in by Nathaniel's kin and learns how much has already been taken from them - and where the pursuit from Paradise finally catches up with the pair of them.