“Going home is better than being home.”

The opening sentence of Elizabeth Black’s compelling debut novel sets the tone for this tale of spiritual renewal. A Chicago journalist returns to her childhood home—a farm near Dodge City—now one of the largest cattle feedlots in the world, seeking her missing younger brother, her childhood Indian companion, and “a home that no longer exists.” Buffalo Spirits is the tragic story of two families who lost the land they love, one to agribusiness in 1975, the other to expulsion and dispossession a century earlier.

The story unfolds through the first-person narrative of two women: Rebecca Kluger, daughter of a third-generation Kansas farmer, and Gentle Wind, daughter of a Plains Apache chief who once lived on the same land. Rebecca’s journey home uncovers a startling hundred-year-old mystery as well as painful truths about her own past. Black hauntingly depicts the majesty and mystery of the Great Plains.

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Buffalo Spirits is filled with affection for the Great Plains and the extraordinary people bound to it. Insightful and disturbing, Elizabeth Black’s first novel confronts the problems faced by farm families struggling to stay on the land they love.
– Senator Bob Dole (KS, 1969–1996)
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Buffalo Spirits was the winner of the 2004 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Literary Award and the 2002 Three Oaks Prize in Fiction (selected from more than 900 entries). It was also a finalist in the 2002 William Faulkner Novel Competition. Copies are available from the author (with optional autograph) and Amazon.