Lifeblood: A Novel

Sarah Austen, a young English dissenting Mormon, against all odds, succeeds in her goal to become a medical doctor in the wilds of nineteenth-century northern Nevada. This is the story of her harrowing journey with her parents by handcart from Iowa to Great Salt Lake. The family is broken apart when Sarah's father chooses to take another wife. Sarah and her mother cross the desert to Genoa, Nevada's first settlement. There, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, Sarah and her mother forge new lives. Other new arrivals to the area are Walther Rottenburg, an immigrant rancher from Saxony, and Giovanni Corveddu, an immigrant from Sardinia who works for a mining consortium. The ranchers and the miners have a running battle over water rights, and it is water, that substance so precious to desert life, that gives this novel its title