Sunrise

Sunrise (2026) is a national bestseller from Téa Obreht, the author of the Orange Prize–winning novel The Tiger’s Wife and the award-winning Inland. A genre-blending work of literary fiction, the novel combines elements of a survival thriller, Western gothic, and metafiction to tell a story about the stories the United States tells itself. The main narrative follows Nina Terzić, a young woman who survives a plane crash in the remote Wyoming mountains. Alone and believing her boyfriend is dead, Nina stumbles upon the abandoned ghost town of Sunrise, where a manuscript found beside a desiccated corpse unearths a violent local history and reveals a potential path to her rescue.

The novel unfolds across multiple timelines to deconstruct The Mythologization of the American West. Through the manuscript Nina finds, the narrative examines into the town’s past, contrasting the heroic dime-novel legend of the gunslinger Anton Vargas with the more complex and morally ambiguous reality of his life. Obreht also explores The Ethics of Cultural Repatriation through historical characters who justify their possession of Indigenous artifacts by claiming a superior spiritual inheritance. These historical layers are anchored by Nina’s harrowing ordeal, which is filtered through the theme of Nature’s Indifference to Human Ego.

This guide refers to the 2026 Random House First Edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, animal cruelty and death, illness, death, emotional and physical abuse, child abuse, substance use, racism, and cursing.

Plot Summary

The plot of Sunrise unfolds across three distinct timelines. The main narrative, set in August and September of 2024, follows Nina Terzić, a 24-year-old nanny, after the small Cessna she is in with her boyfriend, Ben, crashes over the mountains of Wyoming. Ben pushes her out of the failing plane just before it goes down over Horsebone Lake. Nina survives the fall into the freezing water and makes it to shore, initially believing Ben also jumped and will soon find her. After a day of waiting yields no sign of him, she explores the desolate shoreline and discovers a piece of the plane’s fuselage, leading her to conclude that Ben is dead. Starving and alone, she hikes inland and stumbles upon an abandoned ghost town. She takes shelter in an old stable, rationing the few protein bars in her backpack while battling hunger, cold, and the terror of isolation. During her stay, she discovers a trapdoor in the stable floor, beneath which she finds a canvas satchel, old clothes, and the desiccated corpse of a woman.

Terrified but desperate, Nina retrieves the satchel and finds a binder inside containing a map, the photocopy of a dime novel entitled An Incident at Greyrock by Daggart Caul, and a manuscript. The map confirms she is in the historical ghost town of Sunrise and that a town called Hemot City lies 25 miles to the north, giving her a potential destination. The dime novel, set in the late 1800s, details the heroic rescue of telegraph operator Sadie Wilkins by three men: gunslinger Anton Vargas, the stoic Fred Kipley, and the sharp-witted Doctor “Preacher” Maclean. The men help Sadie escape when the Greyrock station house where she works is ambushed by bandits. Together, they become local legends known as the Greyrock Four. Finally, the manuscript is a historical novel titled “Sunrise” by an author named LT Hawley, whom Nina presumes is the woman in the crawl space. This manuscript provides historical context for the dime novel, and is set in 1902, 20 years after the events of the dime novel, chronicling Vargas’s return to Sunrise. Vargas is terminally ill and estranged from Preacher, seeking a final reunion to atone for having abandoned him years earlier before a planned anarchist attack on Fort Searles. The manuscript reveals the unvarnished history behind the Greyrock Four, suggesting that Caul misrepresented their story in his narrative. Kipley, now deputy marshal, enlists Vargas’s help to locate a missing boy named Jules Abadie.

The manuscript is interrupted by a more recent story, set in 2003. This narrative focuses on a young man named Colin “Coll” Yard, the head of the Salt Draw Historical Society, which is dedicated to preserving the legendary history of Sunrise and Anton Vargas. The story details a disturbing night at the local Cabin Bar where a belligerent man named Bob Fournier brings in the dismembered carcass of a wolf he has killed. Coll is present and feels conflicted, ultimately encouraging Fournier in his mockery of the carcass to de-escalate the tension. He is later reprimanded by his sister, Freenie, and his friend, Mira Greyfeather, for his failure to stand up to Fournier. Shortly after, Coll learns that Bob Fournier has died from a mysterious “wasting disease,” which was likely contracted from handling the wolf. The manuscript ends with Coll reluctantly agreeing to give a tour of Sunrise to a persistent writer from Denver named Louise Hawley, who is writing a book on Anton Vargas. When Hawley raises objections to the myth of Vargas, which she learned from an interview recording her grandfather made with the elderly Kipley, Coll, who is starting to feel sick himself, becomes antagonistic towards the visitor.

The narrative returns to the second part of the “Sunrise” manuscript, which opens with the revelation that Jules Abadie has been killed and that his family has been wrongly suspected of murdering him. In secret, Mrs. Abadie gives Vargas a broken arrow that Jules had stolen from the Indigenous artifacts collection of his wealthy employer, John Daisy, and reveals that they are sheltering Jules because Daisy is hunting him. She hopes that returning the arrow will get Daisy to stop, so that he can safely leave Sunrise under the protection of a figure known as El Hechicero. Vargas meets Daisy, who justifies his ownership of Indigenous artifacts by suggesting he has inherited it spiritually. This repulses Vargas, who refuses to turn over the arrow. Vargas then goes out to seek Preacher, who shoots him and reveals himself to be El Hechicero. The end of the manuscript reveals that Vargas and Preacher were former lovers, and that Vargas had brought a letter of apology to Preacher, which he reads as Vargas dies. The manuscript ends with an antagonistic note addressed to Louise, which references Colin Yard.

Armed with this new knowledge and a destination, Nina decides to walk to Hemot City. Believing LT Hawley guided her to safety, she takes the woman’s skull with her, intending to give it a proper burial. Her journey is arduous, especially as she begins to remember Ben’s abusive treatment of her during their relationship. On her first night, she sees the distant glow of a fire. Believing it to be a campsite, she abandons her route to Hemot City and walks toward the light. When she finally reaches the source of the glow, she finds only a lone cedar tree burning after a lightning strike. Defeated, she takes shelter in a nearby shack. The next morning, as she limps back toward her original path, she witnesses a wolf pack kill a bull elk. Overcome by starvation, Nina summons her courage, runs at the pack to scare them off the carcass, and eats some of the raw meat.

Immediately after, a truck appears on the ridge. The driver, a man with a scarred face, is stunned by her bloody, disheveled state. He introduces himself as Colin “Coll” Yard and offers to drive her to the hospital in the nearby town of Salt Draw. On the road, they make a shocking discovery: Ben is alive. He flags down the truck, emaciated and bruised but coherent. He claims that Nina leapt out of the plane shortly before the plane was damaged by a bird strike. He landed the plane in the lake and has been surviving in the wilderness ever since. As Ben gets in, Nina, now in the back seat, notices Coll is carrying bundles of wildflowers identical to the ones she saw piled outside the stable in Sunrise. She only then realizes he has something to do with Hawley’s burial and confronts him, asking who the flowers are for.

Visibly unnerved, Coll deflects by telling her that the local wolves carry a fatal pathogen called canine wasting disease. Seeing the elk blood on her, he states that by eating the meat, she has almost certainly contracted the fatal disease. The shock of this pronouncement causes Nina to faint. Ben and Coll cannot find her pulse and believe she is dead. As the two men stand by the side of the road, devastated, Nina gets up, having feigned her death, and seizes the opportunity for escape. She steals Coll’s truck, leaving a stunned Ben and Coll stranded in the dust. With LT Hawley’s skull bouncing on the passenger seat, Nina drives toward the main highway, past Anton Vargas’s roadside grave. She has survived her ordeal and escaped her past.