Two unlikely people form an unexpected bond in bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler’s captivating historical novel—a New York Times Notable Book. When black cloaked Sarah Canary wanders into a Chinese labor camp in the Washington territories in 1873, Chin Ah Kin is ordered by his uncle to escort “the ugliest woman he could imagine” away. Far away. But Chin soon becomes the follower. In the first of many such instances, they are separated, both resurfacing some days later at an insane asylum. Chin has run afoul of the law and Sarah has been committed for observation. Their escape from the asylum in the company of another inmate sets into motion a series of adventures and misadventures that are at once hilarious, deeply moving, and downright terrifying. “Powerfully imagined...Drop everything and follow Sarah Canary....Humor and horror, history and myth dance cheek to cheek in this Jack London meets L. Frank Baum world....Here is a work that manages to be at the same time (and often in the same sentence) dark and deep and fun.”— The Washington Post Book World Praise for Sarah Canary “Unforgettable...Incandescent...Bewitching.”— Los Angeles Times Book Review “Unexpectedly moving.”— The New Yorker “A playful romp through the Pacific Northwest at the end of the last century, mixing poetry and newspaper reports into a wild yarn.”— San Francisco Chronicle “ Sarah Canary is certainly an enchanted and enchanting narrative, and Karen Fowler has found her way from the details of what we take to be our history, our past, to the legend that is our true present. Her powers of evocation of character and consequence, her storytelling gifts, are exhilarating, and she has given us, at the beginning of her writing life, a work with the suggestive authority—and the evanescent, haunting power—of myth.”—W.S. Merwin “Remarkable...A larger than life, magical realist Western that is funny, mysterious, and harrowing by turns...Its imaginative virtuosity and stylistic resources announce Karen Joy Fowler as a major writer.”— New York Newsday “Part adventure story, part history lesson, part flight of marvelous fancy, Sarah Canary is among the very best novels I have read this year.”— San Diego Tribune “Powerful…Touching…Hilarious…Fowler interweaves historical fact and fiction, creating almost real world, somewhat along the lines of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.”— Locus “[A] quirky, original tale...marvelously framed in the events and scenery of the Northwest frontier.”— San Antonio Express-News “Remarkable...A fascinating romp, in which actual events are so cleverly intertwined with the author’s fanciful inventions that the reader grows unsure which to disbelieve.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Karen Joy Fowler , a PEN/Faulkner and California Book Award winner, is the author of six novels (two of them New York Times bestsellers) and four short story collections. She has been a Dublin IMPAC nominee, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. She lives in Santa Cruz, California. The years after the American Civil War were characterized by excess, ornamented by cults and corruptions. Calamity Jane rode her horse through Indian country, standing on her head, her tangled hair loose along the horse's sides. Chang and Eng, P. T. Barnum's Siamese twins, hunted boar, fathered children, and drank like the gentlemen they were. The Fox sisters held seances and secretly cracked their toe knuckles to dissemble communication from the beyond. T. P. James, a psychic/mechanic in Vermont, channeled Charles Dickens, allowing him to complete his final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , posthumously. Big Jim Kinelly plotted the kidnap of Abraham Lincoln's body. Brigham Young married and Victoria Woodhull told everyone who was sleeping with whom. Football and lawn tennis had their first incarnations. In 1871, strange events took place in the skies over the central and northern United States. Eyewitness accounts allude to spectacular meteor showers, ghostly lights, and, on the ground, a number of fires whose origins were unknown and whose behavior was, in some ways, disquietingly unfirelike. In 1872, the residents of the asylum for the insane in Steilacoom, Washington, were thrown out of their beds by earthquakes resulting from volcanic activity in the Cascade Mountains. The event was so profound it cured three of the patients instantly. These cures were responsible for a brief and faddish detour in the care of the mentally ill known as shake treatments. Across an ocean, in China, the Manchus prepared for the Year of the Rooster and the end of the female Regency. The power of the Dowager Empress shrank. The influence of the place eunuchs grew. Neither had much energy to spare for the Celestials dispersed abroad. In 1873, in the fir forests below Tacoma, Washington, a white woman with short black hair and a torn black dress stumbled into a Chinese railway worker's camp.                   Chapter One: The Year of t