Breath and Bones

In 1884, Famke Summerfugl is ousted from her convent in Denmark for sensuousness and pulled from servitude by a second-rate painter named Albert Castle. Loving to be looked at, and able to stand perfectly still without shivering, Famke is the ideal artist's model.

When Albert takes his eight-foot masterpiece and leaves his model behind, Famke sets out over the Atlantic, convinced that she is his muse.

Following Mirabilis, her highly acclaimed debut, Susann Cokal blends pre-Raphaelite painting, American brothels, Utahan polygamists, a bit of cross-dressing, a dynamite-wielding labor movement, one California millionaire, and the invention of electircal sexual stimulation (as treatment for consumption) into a comic novel that gallops across the American West.

"This riveting piece of historical fiction brings to life the beauty and depravity of the West as well as the spirit of a doomed young woman in her dubious pursuit of love." Library Journal

"It’s almost impossible not to be amused, then intrigued and finally impressed with the heroine of Susann Cokal’s new novel, Breath and Bones....At various points in its narrative, Breath and Bones elicits laughter, empathy, shock. But Cokal pulls our strings while maintaining a consistent, authoritative voice." John Mark Eberhart, The Kansas City Star

"Cokal's rich language and ability to craft an intriguing tale and heroine will pull readers along as they hope for the heroine's happiness." The Rocky Mountain News

"Cokal’s storytelling blends the morbid and the titillating with imaginative exuberance....[T]he story of Famke's quest...brings to mind the question Martin Amis asked of 'Lolita': how was it possible to limit her adventures to 'this 300-page blue streak -- to something so embarrassingly funny, so unstoppably inspired, so impossibly racy?'" The New York Times Book Review

A rollicking comic novel set in 1884 about a Dutch artist's model who follows a painter to the American West, by the author of Mirabilis.