Forthcoming from William Morrow, October 3rd, 2023
Available for Preorder at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Kobo, and your local bookstore
A sweeping rags-to-riches story of survival, greed, and injustice across American history following a family transformed by the Klondike Gold Rush, perfect for readers of The Luminaries and How Much of These Hills Is Gold.
“Told in glimmering prose and rich with historical detail, The Prospectors immerses us in the Yukon Gold Rush so deeply, you can feel the grit on your hands.”—Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts
The middle daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling inferior and destitute. But when her elder sister’s husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice finally seizes control of her destiny by joining a wave of white settlers making the dangerous trek to the Klondike.
What follows is an awakening of ambition for the quietly opportunistic Alice, who, by luck and circumstance, becomes tightly intertwined in her sister and brother-in-law’s newfound fortune, as well as the beginning of a generations-long family quest for wealth that unfolds against the icy Canadian wilderness and the booming oilfields of California.
One hundred years later, in 2015, Alice’s great-great-granddaughter Anna must grapple with moral conflict and questions of justice as she travels to the Klondike to bequeath her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation.
Bringing the Klondike and turn-of-the-century California to vivid life, Ariel Djanikian weaves an ambitious narrative of claiming the American Dream and its rippling effects across generations. Sweeping and awe-inspiring, The Prospectors is an unforgettable story of family loyalties that interrogates the often-overlooked hostilities and inequities born during the Gold Rush era.
“Thrilling…an indisputable page turner” –Michael Schaub, NPR
In America-Five, a high-tech, underground Utopia, five generations of people live in peace and comfort. Every variable—food production, medical care, childbirth—is carefully planned and controlled, and all citizens work toward one common dream: immortality in a perfect world.
Natasha Wiley works in the Office of Mercy, which is tasked with eliminating—or “sweeping,”— the nomadic survivors of a cataclysmic Storm, which centuries ago rattled the planet. The Office’s work is considered the paradigm of ethical behavior, humanely terminating the suffering so unavoidable in nature. The pain and anguish of an uncertain, mortal life—all ended in one merciful flash.
On the morning of one of the largest sweeps in America-Five’s history, Natasha wakes with an uneasy feeling and she can’t bring herself to celebrate as joyfully as her fellow citizens. When her mentor and colleague Jeffrey selects her to join a special team to venture Outside for the first time, Natasha’s doubts flood in: Is life inside the settlement the only option? Are the people beyond the settlement truly anguishing in their brutal environment?. . Are the sweeps as humane as Natasha has been taught?