Phyllis Barber is an award-winning author of nine books, including Raw Edges and How I Got Cultured, and winner of the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She has received awards for both her fiction and nonfiction and has published essays and short stories in North American Review, Crazyhorse, and Kenyon Review. She has been cited as Notable in The Best American Essays and in The Best American Travel Writing. In 2005, Barber was inducted into the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame. She lives in Park City, Utah.

When Sophia Hughes meets Geoffrey Scott in St. Thomas, a scrap of inhospitable desert in the Utah Territory, she is torn between her attraction for the stranger, her fidelity as a polygamist wife, and her unresolved feelings for the man who abandoned her.