Sara Donati Books In Order

Wilderness Books In Publication Order

  1. Into the Wilderness (1998)
  2. Dawn on a Distant Shore (2000)
  3. Lake in the Clouds (2002)
  4. Fire Along the Sky (2004)
  5. Queen of Swords (2006)
  6. The Endless Forest (2009)

Waverly Place Books In Publication Order

  1. The Gilded Hour (2015)
  2. Where the Light Enters (2019)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Homestead (1997)
  2. Tied to the Tracks (2006)
  3. The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square (2008)

Wilderness Book Covers

Waverly Place Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Sara Donati Books Overview

Into the Wilderness

This beautifully wrought, passionate novel of early America is a masterpiece of romantic fiction and the debut of a remarkable new author. Not since Diana Gabaldon has an author captured a time and a place and a love affair with so much mastery. From the opening page, the reader is transported to another world, swept away by the passions of two unforgettable lovers. The novel revolves around the forbidden, incandescent affair of a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. When Elizabeth Middleton leaves England to join her father and brother in the remote mountain village of Paradise in New York, she does so with a strong will and an unwavering purpose: to teach school. It is December of 1792 when she arrives in a cold climate unlike any she has ever experienced. And she meets a man different from any she has ever encountered a white man dressed like a native. His name is Nathaniel Bonner, also known to the Mohawk people as ‘Between Two Lives.’ Elizabeth’s ultimate destiny, here in the heart of the wilderness, lies in the odyssey to come: trials of faith and flesh, and passion born amid Nathaniel’s own secrets and divided soul.

Dawn on a Distant Shore

Sara Donati’s debut novel, Into the Wilderness, was hailed as ‘epic in scope, emotionally intense…
an enrapturing, grand adventure’ BookPage and ‘a captivating saga…
definitely the romance of the year when it comes to transcending genre boundaries’ Booklist. Author Diana Gabaldon called it ‘one of those rare stories that let you breathe the air of another time, and leave your footprints on the snow of a wild, strange place.’ Now, in her second novel, this award winning master storyteller once again blends fact and fiction, and re creates her beloved characters from Into the Wilderness in an eloquent, enthralling tale of romance and adventure. Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner have settled into their life together at the edge of the New York wilderness in the winter of 1794 when Elizabeth gives birth to healthy twins. But soon the events in Canada draw Nathaniel far away from his new family. Word has reached them that Nathaniel’s father has been arrested by crown officials in British Canada. Nathaniel reluctantly leaves Hidden Wolf Mountain to set out for the distant city, determined to see his father freed. Instead Nathaniel is imprisoned and finds himself in imminent danger of being hanged as an American spy. In a desperate bid to save her husband, Elizabeth bundles her infants and sets out on the long trek to Montreal. Accompanied by her stepdaughter, Hannah, their wise friend Curiosity Freeman, and Runs from Bears, a Mohawk warrior and lifelong friend of Nathaniel’s, Elizabeth journeys through the snowy wilderness and across treacherous waterways. But she soon discovers that freeing Nathaniel will take every ounce of her courage and inventiveness. It is a struggle that threatens her with the loss of what she loves most: her children. Torn apart, the Bonners must embark on yet another perilous voyage…
this time all the way across the ocean to the heart of Scotland, where a wealthy earl claims kinship with Nathaniel’s father, Hawkeye. In his heart, the Mahican tribe of Hawkeye’s youth is the truest kin he will ever know, just as Nathaniel will always remain loyal to the Mohawk nation. But with this journey a whole new world opens up to Nathaniel and Elizabeth and a destiny they could never have imagined awaits them…
.A sweeping epic of romance and adventure, Dawn on a Distant Shore establishes Sara Donati as one of today’s most gifted storytellers. With well drawn characters and an evocative love story that is intricately woven into the rich history of our nation’s past, this extraordinary novel will enthrall readers like few others and sweep them away to a whole other time and place.A sweeping epic of romance and adventure, Dawn on a Distant Shore establishes Sara Donati as one of today’s most gifted storytellers. With well drawn characters and an evocative love story that is intricately woven into the history of our nation’s past, this extraordinary novel will enthrall readers like few others and sweep them away to a whole other time and place.

Lake in the Clouds

In her extraordinary novels Into the Wilderness and Dawn on a Distant Shore, award winning writer Sara Donati deftly captured the vast, untamed wilderness of late eighteenth century New York and the trials and triumphs of the Bonner family. Now Donati takes on a new and often overlooked chapter in our nation’s past and in the life of the spirited Bonners as their oldest daughter, the brave and beautiful Hannah, comes of age with a challenge that will change her forever. Masterfully told, this passionate story is a moving tribute to a resilient, adventurous family and a people poised at the brink of a new century. It is the spring of 1802, and the village of Paradise is still reeling from the typhoid epidemic of the previous summer. Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner have lost their two year old son, Hannah s half brother Robbie, but they struggle on as always: the men in the forests, the twins Lily and Daniel in Elizabeth s school, and Hannah as a doctor in training, apprenticed to Richard Todd. Hannah is descended from healers on both sides one Scots grandmother and one Mohawk and her reputation as a skilled healer in her own right is growing. After a long night spent attending to a birth, Elizabeth and Hannah encounter an escaped slave hiding on the mountain. She calls herself Selah Voyager, and she is looking for Curiosity Freeman a former slave herself, one of the village s wisest women and Elizabeth s closest friend. The Bonners take Selah, desperately ill, to Lake in the Clouds to care for her, and with that simple act they are drawn into the secret life that Curiosity and Galileo Freeman and their grown children have been leading for almost ten years. The Bonners will do what they must to protect the Freemans, just as Hannah will protect her patient, who presents more than one kind of challenge. For a bounty hunter is afoot Hannah s childhood friend and first love, Liam Kirby. While Elizabeth and Nathaniel undertake a treacherous journey through the endless forests to bring Selah to safety in the north, Hannah embarks on a very different journey to New York City, with two goals: to learn the secrets of vaccination against smallpox, a disease that threatens Paradise, and to find out what she can about Liam s immediate past and what caused him to change so drastically from the boy she once loved. The obstacles she faces as a woman and a Mohawk make her confront questions long avoided about her place in the world. Those questions follow her back to Paradise, where she finds that the medical miracle she brings with her will not cure prejudice or superstition, nor can it solve the problem of slavery. No sooner have the Bonners begun to rebound from their losses old and new than they find themselves confronted by more than one old enemy in a battle that will test the strength of their love for one another. Hannah faces the decision she has always dreaded: will she make a life for herself in a white world, or among her mother s people?

Fire Along the Sky

With epic sweep and breathtaking adventure, Sara Donati’s bestselling saga of an Early American family s struggle for survival in the Northeast wilderness continues with the story of an indomitable woman and an unforgettable journey of redemption across a young nation threatened by the flames of war. The year is 1812 and Hannah Bonner has returned to her family s mountain cabin in Paradise. But Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner can see that Hannah is not the same woman as when she left. For their daughter has come home without her husband and without her son and with a story of loss and tragedy that she can t bear to tell. Yet as Hannah resumes her duties as a gifted healer among the sick and needy, she finds that she is also slowly healing herself. Little does she realize that she is about to be called away to face her greatest challenge ever. As autumn approaches, news of the latest conflict with Britain finds the young men of Paradise including eighteen year old Daniel Bonner eager to take up arms. Against their better judgment, Nathaniel and Elizabeth must let him go, just as they must let his twin sister Lily, a stubborn beauty, pursue her independence in Montreal. But on the eve of the War of 1812, an unexpected guest arrives from Scotland: It is the Bonners distant cousin, the newly widowed Jennet Scott of Carryckcastle. Far from home, Lily and Jennet will each learn the price of pursuing their dreams and the possibility of true love. But it s Hannah herself who must risk everything once more this time to save Daniel, who s been taken prisoner by the British. As the distant thunder of war threatens Paradise, Hannah may learn to live and maybe love again in one final act of courage, duty, and sacrifice.A gifted writer, a master storyteller, and a first rate historian, Sara Donati has written a powerful, poignant, and movingly romantic novel that chronicles the lives and adventures of a family as compelling and unforgettable as any in American fiction. From the Hardcover edition.

Queen of Swords

It is the late summer of 1814, and Hannah Bonner and her half brother Luke have spent more than a year searching the islands of the Caribbean for Luke’s wife and the man who abducted her. But Jennet s rescue, so long in coming, is not the resolution they d hoped for. In the spring she had given birth to Luke s son, and in the summer Jennet had found herself compelled to surrender the infant to a stranger in the hope of keeping him safe. To claim the child, Hannah, Luke, and Jennet must journey first to Pensacola. There they learn a great deal about the family that has the baby. The Poiterins are a very rich, very powerful Creole family, totally without scruple. The matriarch of the family has left Pensacola for New Orleans and taken the child she now claims as her great grandson with her. New Orleans is a city on the brink of war, a city where prejudice thrives and where Hannah, half Mohawk, must tread softly. Careful plans are made as the Bonners set out to find and reclaim young Nathaniel Bonner. Plans that go terribly awry, isolating them from each other in a dangerous city at the worst of times. Sure that all is lost, and sick unto death, Hannah finds herself in the care of a family and a friend from her past, Dr. Paul de Guise Savard dit Saint d Uzet. It is Dr. Savard and his wife who save Hannah s life, but Dr. Savard s half brother who offers her real hope. Jean Benoit Savard, the great grandson of French settlers, slaves, and Choctaw and Seminole Indians, is the one man who knows the city well enough to engineer the miracle that will reunite the Bonners and send them home to Lake in the Clouds. With Ben Savard s guidance, allies are drawn from every segment of New Orleans s population and from Andrew Jackson s army, now pouring into the city in preparation for what will be the last major battle of the War of 1812. From the Hardcover edition.

The Endless Forest

With a master storyteller’s skill and a historian s precision, Sara Donati has delighted readers and critics alike with her bestselling novels of the nineteenth century New York frontier. Now she brings us The Endless Forest, set in the remote village of Paradise, where the Bonner family that readers first met in Into the Wilderness make their home. The spring of 1824 is a challenging one for the inhabitants of Paradise N.Y. when a flood devastates the village. But for Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner, it s also a time of reunion as their children return from far off places: Lily and her husband from Italy, and Martha Kirby, the Bonners ward, from Manhattan. Although Lily is nursing her own grief, it is Martha, fleeing a crushing humiliation, who brings with her trouble that will reverberate in all their lives. In the sudden peace that follows the storm, as families struggle to rebuild, childhood friends Martha and Daniel, Lily s twin brother, suddenly begin to see each other in a new light. But their growing bond is threatened when Martha s mother arrives back in Paradise a decade after abandoning her daughter. Jemima Southern is a dangerous schemer who has destroyed more than one family, and her anger touches everyone, as do her secrets. Has Jemima come to claim her daughter or does she have something else in mind? Whatever happens, Martha and Daniel and all the Bonners must stand united against the threats to both heart and home. Painful secrets and hidden sorrows, joy, heartbreak, and passion follow the Bonners through a season of change and renewal. A rich, passionate, multilayered portrayal of family strength and endurance in a fascinating place and time, The Endless Forest will be remembered long after the last page is turned.

Homestead

Each life has its place, and every variation ripples the surface of the tiny alpine village called Rosenau. Be it a mysteriously misaddressed love letter or a girl’s careless delivery of two helpless relatives into Na*zi hands, the town’s balance is ever tested, and ever tender. Here is a novel spanning eighty years years that bring factories and wars, store bought cheese and city trained teachers weaving the fates of the wives, mothers, and daughters in this remote corner of Austria. To quote Rosellen Brown, ‘the women in this haunting book are deeply and uniquely of their place, yet they speak often wordlessly of women’s longings and satisfactions everywhere.’

Tied to the Tracks

Miss Zula Bragg, award-winning writer in residence at Ogilvie College in Ogilvie, Georgia, has finally said yes to a documentary about her life. She insists that Tied to the Tracks, a shoestring film company from up North produce it-because, she says, they have an edge. So the entire company is summoned to Ogilvie-Angie Mangiamele, who writes, produces, and keeps it all together; Rivera Rosenblum, who photographs and edits; and Tony Russo, principal photographer and soundman. Only Angie is reluctant to head south because the new chair of the English department at Ogilvie is John Grant, and John and Angie have a fiery past.

A member of the founding Ogilvie family on his mother’s side, John has finally returned home after years ‘up North’ to take up his place in the community and to marry the lovely Caroline Rose, the last unmarried daughter of the prominent Rose family in what Ogilvie residents regard as the wedding of the century. The town-rich with tradition and rife with gossip-is fascinated by the three Yankees, but when it seems as though sparks still fly between John and Angie, the townsfolk rally to protect their own.

The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square

From the author of Tied to the Tracks comes a charming new novel set in Lambert’s Corner, South Carolina a beautiful town where no one’s secrets remain secret for very long.

For John Dodge, moving to new places and reviving ailing businesses is a way of life. So when he sees an ad for Scriveners, a stationery shop in a small town in South Carolina, he decides to take the plunge.

As soon as he arrives in Lambert’s Corner, Dodge falls happily into the whirl of gossip, gifts, and quintessential Southern hospitality. Link Kay, one of his employees, warms up to him after Dodge admires his expertise on pens. Bean Hurt a feisty and outspoken ten year old becomes a fast friend. And Maude Golden, the mayor, supplies him with indispensable information. But the one person who really catches Dodge’s eye is Julia Darrow the beautiful but aloof pajama wearing owner of the Cocoon, a popular store specializing in luxury linens. Dodge tries to befriend her, but she remains elusive and mysterious. Everyone knows that she is a widow, but no one seems to know why she came to town or why she never leaves Lambert Square or does she?

Like Dodge, Chicago born Julia is fleeing a tumultuous past. But with the help of a hilarious and endearing cast of characters, Julia and Dodge learn that, sometimes, you don’t need to go far to find home.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment