The Four Winds

Pages: 454
Published: 2021
Language: English

Texas, 1934. Elsa Martinelli has finally found a place to belong on her in-laws' wheat farm on the Great Plains, but the land she loves is dying. Years of drought have broken the soil into dust, the crops have failed, and towering black storms bury everything the family owns.

When her husband loses heart and disappears, Elsa is left to choose between fighting for the land that has become part of her and taking her children west to California, where work and water are rumored to be plentiful. What she and hundreds of thousands of other migrants find instead is prejudice, exploitation, and a fight for dignity in the labor camps of the San Joaquin Valley, watched with a mixture of longing and rebellion by her fierce teenage daughter, Loreda.

Kristin Hannah's Depression-era saga is a portrait of hard times and harder choices, and of one ordinary woman's slow discovery of her own strength.

Prose complexity: 4/10

Sad Emotional Hopeful Melancholic Atmospheric Gritty

Survival Family Saga Coming of Age Sacrifice

Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

Kristin Hannah

Kristin Hannah (born September 25, 1960) is an American novelist and former attorney. She has written more than twenty novels, including Firefly Lane (2008), Winter Garden (2010), The Nightingale (2015), The Great Alone (2018), The Four Winds (2021) and The Women (2024). The Nightingale, set in France during the Second World War, has sold more than 4.5 million copies and been translated into 45 languages. Firefly Lane and The Great Alone have both been adapted for the screen, with a film adaptat...

Elsa MartinelliProtagonist

Overlooked daughter of a well-off Texas family who marries into the Martinelli wheat farm and holds her children together through the Dust Bowl and the migration west.

Loreda MartinelliSupporting

Elsa's headstrong teenage daughter, chafing against farm life and later drawn to the migrant workers' cause.

Anthony MartinelliSupporting

Elsa's young son, called Ant, whose health suffers badly in the dust storms.

Rafe MartinelliSupporting

Elsa's restless husband, a Martinelli son who never wanted the land and dreams of leaving it.

Rose MartinelliSupporting

Rafe's mother, an Italian immigrant bound to the family farm by faith and stubbornness.

All characters in The Four Winds