In an astoundingly well-imagined novel about a moment in American history when the modern and the ancient were at war, Jim Fergus takes readers on a journey of magnificent sweep and heartbreaking consequence. With prose so vivid that the road dust practically rises off the page, THE WILD GIRL is an epic novel told by a master of the form.When Ned Giles is orphaned as a teenager, he packs his bags into his parents’ car—his only inheritance from their indebted estate—and heads West. His goal is to join the Great Apache Expedition, a band of paying gentlemen and their servants who are enlisted in the search for the 7-year-old son of a wealthy Mexican landowner, who was kidnapped by Wild Apaches. Once at his destination, Giles is befriended by the drunken head photographer for the daily newspaper, who shows him the ropes of being a news photographer, and Ned joins up with an eccentric band of dilettantes, lawmen, and one female anthropologist, who will head off to Mexico in search of the boy. First, however, they discover a wild Apache girl separated from her mother during a Mexican massacre of her tribe, now languishing in a Mexican jail cell, speechless and unwilling to eat or drink. Ned hatches a plan to return her to her people in exchange for the boy. As Ned and his friends close in on their goal of exchanging boy and girl, they walk directly into the hands of the Wild Apaches, who capture them. Torn by loyalties to a wild girl he’s come to love, and to his friends, Ned makes choices that will haunt him for the rest of his days.
