Wild Sisters: Friendship, Freedom, and the Dream of a Woman's World on the Texas Frontier

From an award-winning producer of the hit podcast Serial comes a mischievous and poignant saga that reads a bit like a feminist-retelling of Lonesome Dove, about a group of mothers on the Texas prairie who leave their husbands to live by their own rules.

This is the exhilarating true story of a small group of women who came together to do something that was, in the 1860s, quite extraordinary: to create a place where their own happiness, rather than that of their husbands or children, could be their aim. Moving in together into a grand hotel in Belton, Texas, that they’d turn into a wildly profitable enterprise, the forty-odd members of the Woman’s Commonwealth would soon find themselves both local pariahs and international celebrities.

The decades to come would not be easy. They had violent husbands, jealous neighbors, wayward daughters, and embittered sons. They would be shot at, institutionalized, and mocked. But rather than seek to change a hostile society, their goal was simple: to create a better one for their little community, one that left them free to pursue their own quotidian joys.

Lyrically written and bursting with humor, wisdom, and love, The Wild Sisters weaves the tenderness of Little Women and the irreverence of All Fours into an intimate, often astonishing story of three generations of mothers imagining a different kind of life for themselves and their daughters in a world without men.