Téa Obreht with Parini Shroff - Sunrise

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From Téa Obreht, the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Sunrise is an explosive story spanning three lives and one hundred years in a ghost town where secrets refuse to stay buried.

The book has already been named a "Most Anticipated Book of the Year" by Esquire, Literary Hub, and Today. Liz Moore, author of The God of the Woods, notes, “I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written, but I might love this one the most.”

Téa will be joined in conversation by Parini Shroff, the bestselling author of The Bandit Queens.

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ABOUT THIS EVENT

• This event will be hosted by Book Passage at our Corte Madera store & online.
• FREE ADMISSION / RSVP REQUESTED / Open Seating
• Following the presentation, there will be a signing line or a meet-and-greet.
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In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.

In 2003, Sand Daw’s golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.

In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?

These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.

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“The title refers to a town in Wyoming that has a magical ‘Brigadoon’ quality. The new novel by the author of bestselling The Tiger’s Wife is set in multiple time frames…2024, 2003 and 1902. In each, characters struggle to get at the truth about what’s going on in the western town. Eventually, the stories converge and Obreht reveals the ghosts that haunt Sunrise.” -Minnesota Star-Tribune

“The Great Plains serve as a site of mystery and revelation…all three of Obreht’s protagonists are compellingly crafted, and all three are driven by secrets, which the author reveals slowly…Obreht has created quite a challenge for herself here, and she delivers a virtuoso performance. In her hands, these three narratives aren’t just satisfying on their own. They illuminate each other in ways that are both elegant and emotionally deep. An adventurous, rewarding novel from a writer who just gets better and better.” -Kirkus, starred review

“Obreht is riveting in each time frame as she exults in emulating and subverting tales of the Old West while exposing the poisonous complexities of gender, taboo love, myth, history, and our desecration of the wild in a breathtaking, shocking, and reverberating survival story.” -Booklist, starred

"A Wyoming ghost town provides the stage for this spectacular novel from Obreht about the enduring myths of the Wild West...Obreht employs impressive restraint, providing just enough clues to create intrigue as the reader pieces together the connections between the three storylines...it careens to an explosive climax. Readers will have a blast." -Publishers Weekly, starred

“Obreht’s latest novel is an unputdownable, metafictional, and nimble page-turner…The book’s structure is part of its pleasure, as is Obreht’s uncanny ability to write convincingly, it seems, about everything and everywhere and everyone, her precise, generous prose like being dunked into a new reality; with every section I found myself both anxious to get to the next, to find out what happened, and equally reluctant to leave…The result of all this is an adventure novel about what we remember and why, a three-pronged fable about the myths we hold dear, both about ourselves and about men and women we’ve never met.” -Lit Hub

“24-year old Nina survives a plane crash in the Wyoming mountains. While searching for her boyfriend, who was flying the plane, she stumbles into a ghost town in the wilderness. There, she discovers a series of secrets that connect her to a gunslinger from a 1902 pulp novel and a historian trying to preserve the ghost town in 2003, in this triple-timeline story that asks: Who writes history, and what do they have to hide?” -Good Housekeeping

“Téa Obreht never disappoints, and I’m excited to see her return to the American West after Inland, my favorite of her novels. This time, Sunrise is set in Wyoming, where three different narratives in 1902, 2003, and 2024 explore the history of a ‘strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned’ ghost town.” –Esquire

“I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. It’s tense and beautifully constructed, and it features Obreht’s signature precision when it comes to both language and emotion. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know.”—Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods

“Sunrise is thrilling and ingenious. In her new novel, Obreht explores this country’s troubled past, its gaps and silences, and the rich history that only new storytellers can excavate.”—Laila Lalami, bestselling author of The Dream Hotel

“Sunrise is everything you could wish for from a storyteller of Obreht’s caliber: a witty, propulsive tale of survival, a spirited reckoning with the ambivalences of American life, a deep dive into the secret histories of the West. Spellbinding and ingeniously crafted, this novel deepens Obreht’s reputation as one of our moment’s most original bards and shows the power of story to orient, investigate, and illuminate.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Something New Under the Sun

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Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Southwest Book Award, and have been finalists for the National Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, among other honors. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.

Parini Shroff is the bestselling author of The Bandit Queens, which was a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a PEN Open Book finalist, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a practicing attorney and currently lives in the Bay Area. Her next novel Some People will publish in July 2026 (purchase below).

Téa Obreht - photo credit Ilan Hare; Parini Shroff - Devin Spratt