Winner of the 2021 Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award in Fiction
"Most Anticipated Book of August" Lambda Literary
"Most Anticipated Fall Book," LGBTQ Reads
Seventeen-year-old Joshua Gaines is the orphaned foster son of a failed doctor on the run from his father’s debt. In 1849, he travels to Independence, Missouri and falls in with the mysterious, four-fingered Renard, and his companion Free Ray, an ex-slave. Joshua offers his medical expertise to their party, and together they embark on the fifteen-hundred mile overland journey to Gold Rush California.
Following the hardship, disease, and death on the trail, the company abandons panning the river in favor of robbery and murder. Engulfed by violence, the young doctor-turned-marauder must reckon with his own morality, his growing desire for the men around him, and the brutality that has haunted him all his life.
For fans of The Revenant and Ian McGuire’s The North Water, Child in the Valley is a tale cut from the turmoil of a fledgling America. It’s a penetrating literary lens that offers a modern, incisive look into the complexities of masculinity, isolation, and the impenetrable nature of greed.
Published by Hub City Press as part of the Cold Mountain Fund Series, in partnership with Charles Frazier.
“Child in the Valley is vividly brutal and haunting, well beyond its subject matter. Gordy Sauer has a bright future ahead of him.”