The Prospectors A Novel

A sweeping rags-to-riches story about claiming the American Dream, following a family transformed by the Klondike Gold Rush. "Told in glimmering prose and rich with historical detail...you can feel the grit on your hands."--Celeste Ng The middle daughter of struggling California fruit farmers, Alice Bush is accustomed to feeling inferior and destitute. But when her elder sister's husband strikes a vein of gold in the Yukon Territory, Alice joins a wave of white settlers making the dangerous trek to the Klondike, thus beginning a generations-long family quest for wealth that unfolds against the icy Canadian wilderness and the booming oilfields of California. One hundred years later, in 2015, Alice's great-great-granddaughter Anna must grapple with moral conflict and questions of justice as she travels to the Klondike to bequeath her would-be inheritance to the First Nations peoples who paid the price for its creation. Bringing the Klondike and turn-of-the-century California to vivid life, Ariel Djanikian weaves an ambitious narrative of claiming the American Dream and its rippling effects across generations.