Press Reviews

• Emma Donoghue

  A vivid, fascinating rag rug of cultural history that braids together stories usually kept apart . . . Gripping, eye-opening, enlightening

• Bettany Hughes

  This book delivers a blazing 360 degree view of the American story. Each page is packed with gumption and grit and genius.

• Lucy Lethbridge

  Literary Review

  Katie Hickman has gathered a collection of intriguingly vivid first-hand accounts written by some of the women who ventured west. . . Hickman's Brave Hearted puts the rough texture of personal experience back into the big narrative of how the west was won. Along the way, she shows us what was lost.

• Kathryn Hughes

  Sunday Times

  In the past 50 years there has been an explosion of scholarly research that has served to dismantle those hoary old myths about the Wild West as a white male space in which women looked worried or sashayed into a saloon bar looking for trouble. In Brave Hearted Hickman makes deft and sensitive use of this new material. The result is a glorious patchwork . . . does these extraordinary women proud

• Daily Mail

  In this richly evocative book, Hickman takes us to the crux of women's experiences in that fast- changing world, where opportunities for women were opening up in an often lawless atmosphere of greed, gambling, drinking and whoring. It was a rough ride, and the survivors were heroines, all of them.

• Christine Bold

  TLS

  'Working mainly with published sources, [Hickman] has woven together an extraordinary range of women's first-person voices - we hear from more than fifty of them - into a gripping narrative.'

• Booklist

  A triumphant narrative that brings many overlooked women into the spotlight.

• Library Journal

  As easy to read as any Western with the added advantage of showing a new version of the Old West, one vital for readers to explore.

• Publishers Weekly

  Full of heartrending accounts of courage and tragedy, this is a vital contribution to the history of America's frontier.

• BBC History Magazine

  An unforgettable cast of characters brings an epic tale to life.

• Clover Stroud

  Independent

  Beautifully written, this gripping book explores the stories of the fierce women who helped shape the American West.

• Christina Lamb

  Sunday Times

  Absolutely compelling; telling the stories of women who for so many years have been written out of history, and making us completely rethink our image of the Wild West.

• Kirkus

  [A] wide-ranging survey of the multifaceted roles of women in the 19th-century settlement of the American West... Hickman writes sensitively... A welcome corrective to the long-skewed male-centric history of westward expansion.

• Amanda Foreman

  Brave Hearted is not just history, it is an incredibly intense page-turning experience. To read what these women endured is to be transported into another universe of courage, loss, pain, and occasionally victory. This book is a triumph.

• Los Angeles Times

  A riveting new history.. Hickman's writing is exquisite; her background as a novelist brings these women into dramatic relief... A meticulous scholar, Hickman draws on diaries and memoirs to immerse us in these women's lives and offer important correctives... Brave Hearted is an alternative history of a frontier that was home for some and a fantasy for others long after the Census Bureau decided it was gone