Elizabeth Crook Books In Order

Novels

The Raven’s Bride (1991)
Promised Lands (1994)
The Night Journal (2006)
Monday, Monday (2014)
The Which Way Tree (2018)

Novels Book Covers

Elizabeth Crook Books Overview

The Raven’s Bride

In 1829, Sam Houston was the thirty six year old governor of Tennessee, and his political horizons seemed limitless. The marriage of this charismatic, ambitious statesman to twenty year old Eliza Allen, the daughter of a prominent land holder, seemed to form the perfect social foundation on which Houston would build his glittering career. But just eleven weeks after the wedding, Eliza suddenly and inexplicably left her new husband, creating a scandal that caused the governor to resign his office in disgrace and embark on an exile that would ultimately deliver him to Texas, and a destiny even grander and more improbable than anyone could have imagined. Through decades of rumor and speculation, Sam Houston and Eliza Allen never revealed the source of their unhappiness, and carried the secret with them to their graves. The Raven’s Bride is a brilliantly original novel that unravels this dark romantic mystery while illuminating a vivid and fascinating moment in America’s past. In these pages, Sam Houston is presented as he must have been a heroic figure called ‘The Raven’ by the Cherokee, vain, flamboyant, magnetic, his outsized personality fueled by a desparate need for love. And Eliza Allen is his match: a prideful, magnificent young woman, both drawn to and disturbed by her husband’s grand aspirations. With the investigative acuity of a historian and the profound empathy of a gifted novelist, Elizabeth Crook has created an enthralling portrait of these star crossed lovers and the vibrant, restless world that brought them together. Richly detailed and splendidly imagined, The Ravens Bride turns a baffling historical conundrum into a complex and deeply affecting love story.

Promised Lands

Elizabeth Crook’s vast yet intimate novel of the Texas Revolution takes us beyond the traditional setpieces of the Alamo and San Jacinto to the other places where the war was fought to the forest traces and prairies and Gulf Coast beaches, and to the hearts of the novel’s vibrant characters. Among them: Domingo de la Rosa the great Tejano ranchero, implacable and devout, for whom the fight against the Anglo ‘heretics’ is nothing less than a holy war. Hugh Kenner a physician whose son has run away to the war. Hugh will discover the heroic strength of his compassion, and also its brutal cost. Katie Kenner Hugh’s restless daughter, a refugee caught up in the massive human stampede known as The Runaway Scrape, who finds herself in love with a foreigner and responsible for the life of an orphan baby. Adelaido Pacheco a dashing tobacco smuggler loyal to no cause but his own, a man without a country and in peril of becoming a man without a soul. Crucita Pacheco Adelaido’s beautiful sister who has lost her family, all but Adelaido, in the cholera epidemic of 1832. Feeling that God has forsaken her, she enters Domingo de la Rosa’s employ as a spy against the Anglo rebels, and discovers an improbable love. Through these people and others, Promised Lands brings a myth encrusted chapter of American history to authentic life. Elizabeth Crook demonstrates once again a stunning command of her period and a passionate regard for her characters. Promised Lands bears the hallmark of a master novelist: a grand vision, rendered on an unforgettably human scale.

The Night Journal

A brilliantly imagined, lavish, and transporting novel of a young woman’s search for the truth about her family s mythic past Meg Mabry has spent her life with her back turned to her legendary family legacy. In the 1890s her great grandmother Hannah Bass composed starkly revealing diaries of her life on the southwestern frontier, first as a Harvey Girl at the glamorous Montezuma Resort in New Mexico and later as the wife of brilliant, and often absent, railway engineer Eliott Bass. A generation later, Hannah s daughter, Claudia Bass, renowned historian known to all as Bassie, staked her academic career and reputation on these vibrant accounts, editing and publishing them to great acclaim. Thanks to the journals and to the industry Bassie created around them, Hannah would forever be one of the most romantic and famous figures of southwestern history. Meg, however Bassie s granddaughter finds the family lore oppressive. When an excavation on the old Bass family property beckons a now elderly and viper tongued Bassie back to the fabled land of her childhood, Meg only grudgingly consents to accompany her. Determined not to live under the shadow of her ancestry, Meg has never even read the journals. But when an unexpected discovery casts doubt on the history recorded in their pages and harbored in Bassie s memories, Meg finally succumbs to the allure of her great grandmother s story and ventures even deeper into Hannah s life to unlock the mystery at the journal s core. Reminiscent of Carol Shields s The Stone Diaries and the novels of Anita Shreve, The Night Journal is an enthralling tale in which Indian ruins, majestic desert hotels, and the hardship and boldness of frontier life fit seamlessly with a modern day story of coming to terms with loss, family secrets, and shattering truths that lie shrouded in memory.