Awards

• Commended for Benjamin Franklin Award (Historical Fiction) 2024

Overview

"""Rhapsodic and sensuous."" ""Savage and tender."" Blood to Rubies is the scorching saga of injustice, love, and redemption in the western wilderness. A young frontier photographer goes West to escape the Civil War draft and settles in the Bitterroot Mountains, ancestral home of the Nez Perce Indians. There he becomes obsessed with a young Irish pioneer woman he spies swimming nude in a mountain lake. He comes to admire the Nez Perce and photographs the young leader, Chief Joseph, and a Nez Perce woman warrior (based on a real historical person). Their stories tangle in a ruthless convergence of fates. As he chronicles Chief Joseph's desperate struggle to save his people and their harrowing 1,500-mile exodus to the Canadian border-the medicine line-to join Sitting Bull in freedom, he feels complicit in their demise. Blood to Rubies has already garnered early praise from New York Times bestselling authors, calling the book ""brilliant,"" ""heartbreakingly beautiful,"" ""unforgettable,"" and ""a riveting debut."""

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9798888240748

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Reviews

"""A sweeping saga told with crushing intimacy and rock-ribbed characters. . . layered between love and war."" -KATHLEEN GRISSOM, New York Times Best-selling Author of The Kitchen House and Crow Mary ""The world needs to know this heroic story of Chief Joseph and his struggle to save his people."" -PETER BUFFETT, Composer of Oscar-Winning Dances with Wolves Fire Dance scene and Emmy Award-Winning 500 Nations and Author of the New York Times Best-selling Life Is What You Make It "" A spellbinding debut . . . both gritty and lush . . . impossible to put down."" -LESLEY KAGEN, New York Times Best-selling Author of Every Now and Then and nine other novels ""Deborah Hufford's brilliant debut novel presents a lyrical, sweeping tale of cultures destined to collide, made personal and very, very human through characters who embody dignity, hope, aspiration and the heartbreak of deep loss. Blood to Rubies will raise a reader's heart, break it, then raise it again with an artist's subtle touch. This book is memorable, its characters vibrant, and its message as current today as it was when this story unfolded. It merits multiple readings, careful thought and a place on a library's highest shelf. -GREG FIELDS, Author, Through the Waters and the Wild 2022 Winner, Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction ""Blood to Rubies takes you on Chief Joseph's epic journey through the most rugged terrain on the planet. The book is so real and so powerful, you feel as if you are riding with Joseph's band in 1877."" -SANDRA BRONCHEAU-McFARLAND, Chief Administrator of the Nez Perce National Trail and Nez Perce Tribal Member ""As a Nez Perce elder who has been on the Chief Joseph Annual Trail Ride nearly thirty times, retracing the exodus of Joseph and our people, I can attest to the crucial importance of that historic event in Nez Perce culture.Some youth in our Chief Joseph Foundation programs ride this trail as a rite of passage Blood to Rubies does justice to this saga and to the bravery of our people."" -BONNIE EWING, Nez Perce Elder, Founding Board Member of Chief Joseph Foundation, Mentor to Tribal Youth, and Descendant of the Nez Perce Chief Twisted Hair who saved Lewis and Clark from starvation and freezing to death in the Bitterroot Mountains in 1805 ""Blood to Rubies is spectacularly reminiscent of Dances with Wolves in its powerful depictions of the land and Native Americans' sacred relationship to Nature. It breaks your heart. We are inspired to understand why the earth is so precious to Native Americans and why it should be to us all."" -GARY KELLER, Location Scout for Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves and Kevin Costner's Emmy Award-winning 500 Nations and Founding South Dakota Film Commissioner"

Author Information

Deborah Hufford is an award-winning writer and magazine editor with stories in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Connoisseur, Better Homes & Gardens, San Francisco Chronicle, many other titles. She is internationally known for her popular historical blog, Notes from the Frontier, with more than 100,000 readers, including many Native followers, history scholars and schoolteachers who use the blog posts as teaching lessons in in their classrooms. She also served as publisher of The Writer's Handbook and The Writer Magazine imprint. She has a Master's degree from the University of Iowa where she taught Writer's Workshop students at the Center for the Book. She has also taught graduate writing and publishing courses at Northwestern University and Marquette University. She grew up an Iowa farm girl with horses and all kinds of critters and was a rodeo queen. She has volunteered extensively with the Chief Joseph Foundation (CJF) and brought in $300,000 in new grants for the Foundation's youth programs. A portion of sales from Blood to Rubies goes to CJF youth programs. After 30 years of work on her debut novel while battling kidney disease, then a heart attack, then end-stage kidney failure, she signed with a publisher the same day her husband was approved as her kidney donor! Now, several months after her successful kidney transplant, Blood to Rubies is finally being published with wonderful literary reviews. Miracles DO happen!

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