Sunrise, the new novel from Téa Obreht, is a neo-Western story set in a remote region of Wyoming, with three interconnected stories spanning a period of over one hundred years. In 2024, twenty-six-year-old Nina survives a plane crash into the isolated Horsebone Lake. Her boyfriend Ben, the single-engine plane’s pilot, is missing. With bears, ravens, and other wildlife as her only company, Nina comes across the abandoned town of Sunrise. In 2003, college dropout Coll lives in the nearby town of Sand Draw. While Coll puts the finishing touches on a historical reenactment, a mysterious incident involving a dismembered wolf as well as the appearance of an investigative writer begins upending his life. And in 1902, Sunrise’s founder, the gunslinger Anton Vargas, returns after many years away to search for both a missing child and an old friend who may be out to kill him.
These interconnected narratives are presented in an enfolding onion-like fashion, with Nina’s story opening and closing the novel with the first and fifth sections, Vargas’s story taking the second and fourth sections, and Coll’s story placed in the center as third. This structure does not indicate narrative weight—in this writer’s opinion, all three stories feel like they could be their own novels, and none of them exist as the “answer” for the others. One story may provide context for the mystery of another story from earlier or later in the timeline. Sometimes that context is guesswork: it is no secret that the Vargas chapters are excerpts from a novelized interpretation of the “real” historical figure, a novelization written by a living character that appears elsewhere.
One can argue that Nina’s story, as the opening and closing to Sunrise, is the heart of the novel. As it stands, however, Coll’s and Vargas’s stories are too interesting to dismiss as explicatory appendages. Nina’s story, we can say, is arguably the most realistic: we follow a comfortably middle-class individual as, initially, they worry their way through the wilderness. It is remarkable how much of Nina’s narrative is spent detailing her anxieties, stressing about matters related to her personal life pre–plane crash, and worrying about unhelpful, detailed hypotheticals that do not actually happen. As we come to learn, Nina is a traumatized individual for more reasons than just the crash, and her inability to stop her hydra-like thinking makes sense. It still comes as a relief when we reach Vargas’s and Coll’s sections, and find the storm of thoughts as narrative style brought to a relative standstill: Vargas’s narrative is presented as a focused Western adventure novel—if historically plausible—while Coll’s tale reads as a straightforward literary novel with an increasing air of eeriness. By the time we reach Nina’s final section, her situation has become desperate enough that the waves of anxious and pedestrian thoughts from the beginning have given way to a focused anguish and the determination to survive.
This is partly to say, in the context of recommending this well-done novel, to give Nina some early leeway. To reach the air of hauntedness and mystery that pervade most of the narratives, we need to sink through regions of ordinary consciousness first. When Sunrise gets cooking it works on tackling the deepest themes of human existence: love, death, and the way the past—even a hundred years before—haunts the present. Of love and death, death has the stronger presence. In Sunrise, love, when it appears, is usually defeated or decayed.
All three stories in Sunrise wrestle with death, sometimes even in a personified, hallucinatory form. Personal doom, too, is allied with monstrous, incomprehensible nature. This is not Henry David Thoreau’s pleasant transcendentalist nature, but rather that obscure force emerging from the woods, ever producing and ever consuming itself. Sunrise, rightfully, is not here to provide answers. It is here, in part, to meditate on the forest and the mysterious, mentally obscure residents of the natural world, the speechless animals.
Sunrise is excellent and recommended. It explores some of the deepest questions of our lives, meditates on some of the great mysteries, and tells three gripping stories along the way. What more can we ask for? “The whole world is coming into color, and with it another heartbeat.” That’s it—an affirmation to live, to keep going, whatever the mysteries that surround us, whatever the trials we must overcome.
FICTION
Sunrise
By Téa Obreht
Random House
Published August 11, 2026
