Shaman

Nineteenth-century America. Scottish physician Robert Judson Cole travels through Boston to the Illinois frontier, where he establishes a practice among settlers and encounters the dispossessed remnants of the Sauk people. His friendship with a Sauk medicine woman introduces him to remedies and traditions excluded from his European training. He marries and raises a family in a landscape where disease, isolation and conflict make medical skill inseparable from endurance.

Robert’s deaf son, known as Shaman, refuses to let his disability prevent him from following the family profession. As father and son learn from one another and from their Indigenous neighbours, the expansion of settlement and the coming of the American Civil War place their household under increasing strain. The novel combines a multigenerational medical story with the history of frontier Illinois, Native American displacement and a nation divided by war.