Product Description

Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.

Sweeping and lyrical, spellbinding and unforgettable, David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense.

It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.

Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.

And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11013 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-05
• Released on: 2008-08-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 514 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This sweeping epic is a compelling and original work set in 1875, when one woman attempts to rid America of polygamy. Ebershoff intertwines his tale with that of a 20th-century murder mystery in Utah, allowing the two stories to twist and turn into a marvelous literary experience. With such a sprawling tale to relate, a few narrators (Kimberly Farr, Rebecca Lowman, Arthur Morey and Daniel Passer) divide up the roles and deliver a solid, professional reading, true to Ebershoffs prose. A Random House hardcover (Reviews, June 23). (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
This ambitious third novel tells two parallel stories of polygamy. The first recounts Brigham Young's expulsion of one of his wives, Ann Eliza, from the Mormon Church; the second is a modern-day murder mystery set in a polygamous compound in Utah. Unfolding through an impressive variety of narrative forms—Wikipedia entries, academic research papers, newspaper opinion pieces—the stories include fascinating historical details. We are told, for instance, of Brigham Young's ban on dramas that romanticized monogamous love at his community theatre; as one of Young's followers says, "I ain't sitting through no play where a man makes such a cussed fuss over one woman." Ebershoff demonstrates abundant virtuosity, as he convincingly inhabits the voices of both a nineteenth-century Mormon wife and a contemporary gay youth excommunicated from the church, while also managing to say something about the mysterious power of faith.
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

After weathering the scrutiny and debates kicked up by Mitt Romney's run for the White House and Warren Jeffs's polygamous sect in Texas, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints probably deserves the rest of the year off. But, lo and behold, here comes an engrossing new novel that resurrects one of the Mormons' most destructive opponents: Ann Eliza Young, a beautiful, articulate woman who once shared Brigham Young's bed and then devoted her life to destroying him.

She's brought back to vivid life by David Ebershoff, an editor at Random House who bears no grudge against Mormons but has spent the last seven years studying their genesis and considering the human costs of revelation and inerrancy. His great collage of a novel mixes the early history of the Mormon Church with the story of a modern-day murder in a breakaway Mormon cult. Readers of Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's bestseller about the violent beginnings of Mormonism in the early 19th century and a double murder carried out by Mormon fundamentalists in 1984, will recognize this mingling of old and new. But Ebershoff has produced a different kind of book. For one thing, he's made up his modern-day adventure and fictionalized the historical record to shape his own ends. And more important, he's produced a novel that poses engaging challenges for the faithful in any denomination without discounting the essential value of faith. The result is a book packed with historical illumination, unforgettable characters and the deepest questions about the tenacity of belief.

Ebershoff's title and much of his material come from a popular memoir that Ann Eliza Young published in 1875 called Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage, Being a Complete Exposé of Mormonism, and Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy. (The Gilded Age knew how to write a subtitle.) Ann was raised in a polygamous home during the early days of the LDS Church when the saints miraculously created towns in the desert. In 1868, when she was 24 and Brigham Young was 67, she became one of his many wives. The total number of his wives and her position among them remain matters of continuing dispute, but all agree that it was not a match made in heaven. Brigham mostly ignored her as he ruled with absolute authority over a prosperous theocracy in uneasy coexistence with the U.S. government.

Five years later, citing abuse, neglect and abandonment, Ann began divorce proceedings and demanded $200,000 of Young's awesome fortune. Given these oversized personalities and the sensational details -- multiple sex partners! millions of dollars! -- the case exploded across the nation's newspapers and resulted in Ann's excommunication, Brigham's brief imprisonment and a torrent of horrible publicity about the church and its leaders. Ann emerged with a new career as a popular lecturer and writer about the degradations of "plural marriage," and 15 years after she began her crusade, the LDS Church ceased the practice of polygamy.

Ebershoff's presentation of Ann's life is a complicated revision of her memoir -- sometimes an act of aggressive editing, other times an act of literary creation. In addition to excerpting her tale and shaping new episodes, he has focused her narrative, trimmed away its considerable detours and subtly modernized her Victorian language while allowing her fierce testimony to retain its antique tone.

But hers is only one voice in the remarkable collection of voices that captures our attention here. Some of the best parts of The 19th Wife are those that Ebershoff has largely invented, including a remorseful chapter by Ann's father, who looks back on his life with deep regret and tries to make sense of his daughter's apostasy. "Her assault is cruel," he admits, "but I often wonder if her assassin's blade has been forged from an unalloyed truth." We learn from him about the tragedy of the so-called Handcart Disaster of 1856, in which fresh Mormon immigrants from Europe were lured into making what became a deadly trek across the United States to Utah. Ebershoff also creates a deposition from Ann's weary brother; it's filled with shame for his part in her marriage to Brigham and for his own failings as a husband. And there are letters written in the late 1930s by Ann's adult son, who's finally found peace in the worship of nature. He regards all that religious drama involving his mother during the previous century with a kind of wistful good humor.

A.S. Byatt once wrote a novel called The Biographer's Tale that presented an incoherent collection of notes meant to reproduce the baffling challenge of ordering disparate material, but she succeeded too well. The various documents and testimonies that Ebershoff creates in The 19th Wife are more artfully designed to play off each other, despite their initially cacophonous sounds. There are newspaper articles and archivists' memos, advertisements and playbills, letters and coded marginalia, even instant messages and a Wikipedia entry. From the conflicting records of others and an alternately moving and self-aggrandizing diary, Brigham Young himself emerges as a fascinating, frightening man of unbridled power who felt the full burden of saving so many souls -- and wiping his enemies off the Earth.

It's difficult to remember that Ebershoff is the ventriloquist behind all of these, even the Master's thesis about Ann supposedly written by a feminist Mormon in 2005. It fills in interesting detail about the period and demonstrates the LDS Church's gradual willingness to tolerate academic research into the darker aspects of its own history.

Less satisfying is the modern-day murder mystery that winds through this complicated collection of material. Jordan Scott is an endearing young man who was expelled at the age of 14 from the Firsts, a fundamentalist Mormon cult in Mesadale, Ariz., that sounds a lot like the one in Texas that dominated the news this spring. After a tough period of destitution and prostitution, Jordan has made a life for himself in California. But that hard-earned stability is disrupted when he hears that his mother has been arrested for murdering his exceedingly creepy, polygamous father. He drives back home to see her for the first time in six years and reluctantly decides to help prove her innocence. He's funny, a little flippant, finally at ease with his homosexuality, "just your regular run-of-the-mill polygamist boo-hoo tragedy," he says. His story, with its corny Hardy Boys theatrics, provides both levity and pathos, but it's jarringly incongruous with the novel's 19th-century voices, and its drama simply can't compete with Ann and Brigham's titanic clash.

Still, as Jordan risks his life snooping around this violent cult, he offers provocative commentary on the splinter groups that Joseph Smith's revelation spawned, the unimaginable humiliations of polygamy and the difficulty of thinking outside the parameters of one's religious community. "I know it's hard to believe people really talk like that," he says about his mother's stubborn devotion, "but consider this: if you didn't know anything else, if your only source of information was the Prophet . . . you'd probably believe it too. You wouldn't know how to form a doubt."

Even after her brutal denunciations of Mormonism and Brigham Young, Ebershoff shows Ann feeling that same persistence of belief, the difficulty of breaking outside everything she once knew. "My faith had been emptied out like a can," she says, not in celebration of her freedom but in full recognition of how harrowing such emptiness is. "I have heard an esteemed medical doctor say that illness is the loneliest state. I would argue that doubt deserves that claim."

There's no use pretending that reading The 19th Wife isn't a lot of work, but its rewards are correspondingly vast. Admittedly, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will have reason to react unenthusiastically to this portrayal of their early leaders, and members of pedophilic cults should definitely choose something else for book club. But the voices Ebershoff has brought to life here dramatize one of the most remarkable periods of America's religious history, and he's just as discerning about the bizarre descendants that can sprout like toxic weeds from a founder's revelation. The greatest triumph is the way all this material, though it's focused on the peculiarities of Mormonism -- devout and heretical, ancient and modern -- illuminates the larger landscape of faith.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Historical fiction that weaves todays headlines with their historical past
I really enjoyed reading The 19th Wife. In fact, it was one of the best books I've read this year. The author, David Ebershoff, skillfully weaves a tale back and forth between the roots of nineteenth century polygamy and a modern day polygamist murder mystery.

Much of the book focuses on the nineteenth century beginnings of polygamy and the Mormon faith, and at first I was put off by this, being more interested in today's headlines than historical fiction, but as I moved through the book I found myself more and more captivated by the very compelling story of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's nineteenth (disputed) wife.

This book is woven with so much historical fact that it becomes hard to separate fact from fiction, but I do believe the author tried to accurately portray the events as much as possible.

Just a few of the highlights and themes in this book include a couple of "lost boys" who were kicked out of their community for small indiscretions, left abandoned on the streets at a young age. Their stories are wrought with pain but end nicely. There are also a few instances of modern day escapes from the polygamist community; some forced and coerced marriages; and a consistent theme of hurt feelings as the husbands take on additional wives. This book covers these stories and so many more it would be difficult to touch on all of them in a short review.

I have never read a nearly 600 page book in just four days, but that is just what I did with this book. I felt a very emotional connection to this book and it's characters and I hope to read more from this author.

Ripped from the headlines?
When I heard what this novel was about, I immediately wanted to read it. The reason is that I've been so intrigued by news accounts of groups like the polygamous fundamentalists featured in this novel. For me, it was like a window into another world.

The story opens with 20-year-old Jordan Scott reading the news online. He sees a photo of a woman being placed into a police car and suddenly realizes that it's his mother! He hasn't seen her since she and his father left him by the side of the highway with $17 dollars in his pocket at the age of 14. You see, Jordan was raised in Utah in a polygamous Mormon sect--an extremist offshoot of the contemporary Mormon Church. Jordan's mom was #19 of his dad's 25 or so wives, and Jordan was raised with about 100 siblings. It's a very different upbringing. Sadly, at the age of 14, Jordan was excommunicated for a non-existent offence, and cast out from his home, family, and the life he'd known. But he's a survivor, and he's made a life for himself in LA.

Seeing that his mother has been arrested for the murder of his father, Jordan realizes that he must return home and face his past. He goes to visit his mother in jail, and she tells him, "I didn't do it!" and begs for his help. With all the conflicted feelings you would imagine, Jordan begins his own investigation into the murder case, and for the first time in years has contact with his former life. Despite the pain this sometimes brings him, he makes friends along the way, and they're a fascinating and diverse group of allies.

This contemporary murder mystery would be more than enough story for your average novel, but in this case, it's only half of it. For the chapters about Jordan and the murder mystery alternate with another story. It's the fictionalized memoir of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Brigham Young, one of the early founders of the Mormon Church. The very formation of the Church, right through its first several decades, are seen through Ann Eliza's eyes. She was a real historic character who did write a memoir about her life, marriage to the decades-older Young, eventual divorce, and crusade against polygamy in the Church.

Ebershoff has woven these two tales together magnificently. I can't claim to have known much about the Mormon faith, its history, or any current issues in the religion, but I was equally fascinated by both stories being told. I realize there's a limit to what a person can learn from a fictional work, but this novel appears to have been meticulously researched. (There's a great author's note at the end.) It's a hefty book, but well-written, compelling, exotic, and more than anything one hell of a story.

Mystery that spans generations
In 1875 Ann Eliza Young, the purported wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, published her memoirs. A year earlier she had left her husband, filed for divorce, fled Utah and had embarked on a nationwide lecture tour fiercely denouncing the evils of polygamy.

Present day California, Jordan Scott, is a 20 year old "lost boy" expelled from the polygamous First Latter Day Saints community of Mesadale, Utah, by the Prophet. Browsing the St. George Register online he is stunned to see his mother on the front page accused on murdering his father, a prominent First. An open chat page on the dead man's computer identifies his murderer, his 19th wife....Jordan's mother.


It took a few false starts before I got into the rhythm of The 19th Wife. Moving from Anne Eliza's life story and history of the westward migration of the Mormons, to present day Utah where Jordan struggles to understand what might have happened, the storyline moves back and forth slowly drawing the reader into the story. Jordan must return to Mesadale and try to uncover the truth of his father's murder and possibly free his mother from jail. Anne Eliza chronicles her family's conversion to Mormonism, their westward migration, the persecution of the sect and their expulsion into the inhospitable west. Jordan has to return to Mesadale where he is unsure who, if anyone can be trusted and where he is watched and shunned at every turn.

As Jordan moves closer to the truth his path intersects with Ann Eliza's story and his life is also in danger. Help from an unexpected source offers him safety, but can it be trusted? David Ebershoff has crafted a masterful, though somewhat twisted tale of family life. Through extensive research he is able to portray the inner workings of a closed society and the corruption of power. This kept me engrossed from beginning to the much unexpected end.