Téa Obreht’s Sunrise revisits the American West to ask who gets to own a story
In her fourth novel, Téa Obreht returns to frontier terrain haunted by legends, ghost towns and contested memories. Sunrise links three timelines to probe courage, cowardice and the uneasy line between recorded history and invention.
Téa Obreht has built a reputation on novels that treat reality as something unstable: histories clash, landscapes feel perilous and the fantastic keeps breaking through. Her fourth novel, Sunrise, follows that pattern as it moves between 2024, 2003 and 1902, using an abandoned mining town in Wyoming to explore how stories are preserved, distorted and fought over.
The novel opens in August 2024 with Nina Terzic, a postgraduate student on what should have been a holiday from her work as a live-in nanny in New York. After a Cessna crash-lands into a lake in the mountains, she gets to shore alone, apparently after jumping from the plane or perhaps being pushed. Her boyfriend Ben is missing, her phone is undamaged but useless, and the reader is left to wonder whether the relationship concealed something darker than romance.
Nina’s search for help leads her into a ghost town, one of the many deserted mining settlements left behind in the American West. There she finds a woman’s body hidden in a cellar, alongside a backpack containing a manuscript. That discovery becomes the hinge of the novel, sending the narrative into a story within a story and shifting the book away from survival drama and toward questions of authorship, memory and myth.