The Four Winds

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.