SUNRISE
Three lives, one hundred years, one ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise, where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife
“I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know.”—Liz Moore, author of The God of the Woods
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Literary Hub, Today, Good Housekeeping,
Three lives, one hundred years, one ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise, where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife
“I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know.”—Liz Moore, author of The God of the Woods
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Esquire, Literary Hub, Today, Good Housekeeping, The Boston Globe
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.
- Random House
- Hardcover
- August 2026
- 336 Pages
- 9781984855534
About Téa Obreht
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, been a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Southwest Book Award, and won for the Dylan Thomas Prize. 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.
Praise
“Téa Obreht never disappoints.” —Esquire
“A Cessna plane crashes into a Wyoming lake and a young woman staggers out, uninjured. As she searches for her missing boyfriend she stumbles into an abandoned, pristine mining town where a pair of conjoined mysteries await, unraveling her sense of time and place.” —The Boston Globe
“Téa Obreht connects her three characters across disparate realities, a speculative marvel and a parable of a nation in the throes of change.” —Time
“This triple-timeline story that asks: Who writes history, and what do they have to hide?” —Good Housekeeping
“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.” —Literary Hub