Savage Lands

Praised by Hilary Mantel, Amanda Foreman, and the New York Times Book Review for her “verve and intelligence... [and] the originality of her imagination,” Clare Clark has become a rising star in historical fiction.

"Vivid with historical details, characters intense with drama. A story to lose yourself in, satisfying read for lovers of period fiction."   -   Sarah Vine, The Times

It is 1704 and, in the swamps of Louisiana, France is clinging on to its new colony with less than two hundred men. Into this hostile land comes Elisabeth Savaret, one of twenty-three women sent from Paris to marry men they have never met.  With little expectation of happiness, Elisabeth is stunned to find herself falling passionately in love with her husband, infantryman Jean-Claude Babelon. But Babelon is a dangerous man to love and betrayal is as much a part of the new world as the old.  

"What a vivid and complete world Clare Clark has created in Savage Lands – an extraordinary feat of imagination, and a sustained feat of recovery. Clare Clark is one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture. I am intensely curious to know what she will do next."  -  Hilary Mantel

Rich in tactile detail, and heart-wrenching in its portrayal of people clinging on to their humanity against the brutality of nature and commerce, this is historical fiction at its best. So absorbing is Clare Clark's recreation of eighteenth-century Louisiana that the reader won't want to leave it, even though the unstable ground on which New Orleans is putting down its first foundations proves far from hospitable.

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2010