Let's meet our main character, who is called *checks notes* Dalva. She's forty-five and living in California, doing excellent and worthy social work with abused and underprivileged kids, but feeling the pull of her childhood home in Nebraska, in a very general way, and in a far more specific way an urge to finally track down the son she gave up for adoption at sixteen after a brief but intense fling with a young half-Sioux man who worked on her grandfather's farm.
An opportunity is provided when her friend and occasional lover Michael, a drink-sozzled university professor, takes an interest in the diaries of her great-grandfather, John Wesley Northridge, an unconventional guy for his time and a big supporter of the rights of the native Sioux in the face of their vicious subjugation by the settlers of the Nebraska plains in the second half of the 19th century. Dalva takes it upon herself to deliver Michael to the Northridge farm and stay for an indefinite amount of time facilitating his access to old man Northridge's journals and whatever other material can be found, and possibly persuading him to take it a bit easier on the old sauce for a bit. Of course this also affords Dalva an opportunity for an extended reunion with various family members, in particular her mother Naomi and sister Ruth, as well as the various long-term staff and hangers-on at the farm whom she has known since childhood.
Of course what this also affords Dalva an opportunity to do is re-live some of her formative childhood experiences, in particular the series of events surrounding the arrival of Duane Stone Horse, the taciturn half-Sioux boy and incomparably expert horse-wrangler taken on by her grandfather (also John Wesley Northridge, as was her late father), his and Dalva's brief relationship and her subsequent pregnancy and the series of furtive shenanigans required for her to have the baby and then give it away. Her relationship with Duane was brief because her grandfather sent him away once he realised that Duane was the baby's father; this, it turns out, was because the old man knew something Dalva didn't, specifically that Duane was John Wesley Northridge III's son - product of an equally brief extra-marital relationship with a native Sioux woman, Rachel - and therefore Dalva's half-brother.
No chance of an emotional reunion between Dalva and Duane, though, because Duane has been dead for fifteen years or so - wounded and shell-shocked after serving in Vietnam and suffering from incurable cancer, he checked out in an impressively dramatic manner by swimming out into the open sea off the Florida Keys on his horse and then offing both of them with a pistol (horse then himself, presumably).
Michael's journal investigations don't go entirely to plan, partly because of his enduring fondness for The Drink and also his decision - while evidently a bit bored during one of Dalva's occasional absences - to attempt to lure local girl Karen into the sack by offering to use some big city contacts to help her establish a modelling career. Perhaps if she were to supply some Polaroids of a, hem hem, candid nature that he could pass on? This plan works better than Michael could have predicted as not only does Karen supply the goods, she also supplies, as it were, the goods, by agreeing to shimmy out of her bathing suit and sit on his face. Barely has he finished going WAHEEEYYY at this, though, than a male family member decides to strike a blow for Karen's honour and puts Michael in hospital with a broken jaw.
It only remains for a couple of outstanding items to be revealed and resolved: firstly a mysterious letter left for Dalva by her grandfather in the family safe which alludes to some specific entries in the great-grandfather's journal and alludes to some items which can be found in the always-locked cellar. This turns out to be the mummified remains of some meddlesome soldiers who came a-calling after Northridge has returned to his farm to settle into retirement, asked too many questions and were aggressive towards Northridge's Sioux wife, whereupon he shot the lot of them and bundled them into the cellar, subsequently taking their horses and abandoning them many miles away to throw pursuers off the scent.
Secondly, a young man called Nelse has been doing some work with Naomi cataloguing wildlife and doing some light horse-wrangling and such like. Dalva hasn't up to this point had much to do with him but eventually Naomi and Nelse call upon her with the revelation that Nelse (now nearly thirty) is her long-lost son.
That revelation is just about the last thing in the book (it literally happens on the penultimate page) and won't actually be a revelation to anyone (like me) who read Dalva and its successor The Road Home in the "wrong" order. The two books' timelines overlap somewhat, but the second book then extends the timeline forward to incorporate Dalva's cancer diagnosis and her preparations for her own death. It also centres other narrative voices, in particular Dalva's grandfather and Nelse himself. Dalva, as the title suggests, is mostly delivered in Dalva's voice, although the middle section is presented as an extract from Michael's journals. Michael, presented here as a vaguely comic character, is used as a vehicle for delivering a bit of satire on academic pursuits, and indeed on any vaguely squishy city types who can't ride a fish, gut a horse and whittle a makeshift shelter out of a giant redwood. Dalva herself, on the other hand, is an intensely endearing central character - my only reservation is just the faint suspicion that, as a woman written by a man, she represents some sort of outdoorsy male fantasy of an ideal woman: fit, active, clearly absurdly hot even in her mid-forties, and with a commendably robust, guilt-free, no-strings attitude to sex.
Overall I didn't think Dalva was as good as The Road Home, but as always that may just be a consequence of the order I read them in. It just seemed a bit more meandering narratively, in the early sections in particular, and the late and slightly off-handed revelation of oh yeah, I shot some guys and hid them in the cellar, you might want to tidy up a bit, was a bit jarring. Just to be clear, though, it's still very good and I'd highly recommend reading both books, preferably in the intended order.
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