Nine Lives of Sadie Briar

Begins in blood and ends in fire, Nine Lives of Sadie Briar traces one woman’s quietly heroic journey through an American century. From an Indian raid on the Kansas frontier in 1869 when she’s briefly taken captive as a baby to Christmas Eve 1968 when she witnesses man first orbit the moon, Sadie experiences an epochal range of event and emotion through two husbands, a son and a daughter, and a giant grandson, deemed an idiot, abandoned to her faithful care over her final 50 years. Of keen mind and spirited, she comes of age in the fervent Populist era, falls in love with a radical newspaper man and shares in the ideals and conflicts that still play from the heartland to the shining seas. Sadie’s tale is a slice of the American saga that echoes down to the very moment.

“Melvin Litton’s book inhabits a woman’s consciousness in ways that few male authors since Tolstoy have been able to do…” – Barbara A Kerr, PhD, Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas, author of Smart Girls, Gifted Women and Psychology of Liberty

“Litton has an ear for the music of powerful writing in the treasure of each sentence…a story driven by the surprising, fierce, brave, and quirky nine lives of the captivating title character…” – Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, past Kansas Poet Laureate, author of The Magic Eye

“Melvin Litton makes you feel the raw beauty of the land and the struggles of the people who inhabited it…and lets you feel what Sadie felt, a fierce loyalty to the prairie and a wisdom that comes with her span of time there…” – Sue Shoemaker-Shea, Echo Dell Farm, Ionia, KS