Hardland

One bullet is all it takes to rid twenty-six-year-old Ruby Fortune of her no-good husband--and the innkeeper and mother of four boys walks free. Set against the breathtaking backdrop of Arizona's Sonoran Desert in the early 20th Century, Hardland serves up a tough protagonist who fights to survive in one of the toughest towns in the American West.

A native New Yorker, Ashley E. Sweeney is the winner of the Nancy Pearl Book Award and more than a dozen other awards for her previous novels, Hardland, Answer Creek, and Eliza Waite. The Irish Girl is based on her paternal great-grandmother’s story of coming alone from Ireland to America in the late nineteenth century. Sweeney lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest and Tucson.