Deborah Hufford’s Blood to Rubies has been named the 2023 American Writing Awards Fiction Book of the Year. The AWA also awarded Blood to Rubies Winner-Debut Novel and Winner-Western Novel.
Other 2023 awards for Blood to Rubies includes:
- Short-Listed, 2023 Laramie Award
- Long-Listed, 2023 Somerset Award
- Winner, 2023 Multicultural Novel, Best Book Awards
- Finalist, 2023 Western Novel, Best Book Awards
- Winner, 2023 Literary Novel, Firebird International Book Award
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Winner, 2023 Debut Novel, Firebird International Book Award
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Amazon’s Top #14 Bestselling Book, Native American Fiction
“Rhapsodic and sensuous.” “Savage and tender.” Blood to Rubies is the scorching saga of injustice, love, and redemption in the western wilderness. A young frontier photographer goes West to escape the Civil War draft and settles in the Bitterroot Mountains, ancestral home of the Nez Perce Indians. There he becomes obsessed with a young Irish pioneer woman he spies swimming nude in a mountain lake. He comes to admire the Nez Perce and photographs the young leader, Chief Joseph, and a Nez Perce woman warrior (based on a real historical person). Their stories tangle in a ruthless convergence of fates. As he chronicles Chief Joseph’s desperate struggle to save his people and their harrowing 1,500-mile exodus to the Canadian border-the medicine line-to join Sitting Bull in freedom, he feels complicit in their demise.
Blood to Rubies has already garnered early praise from New York Times bestselling authors, calling the book “brilliant,” “heartbreakingly beautiful,” “unforgettable,” and “a riveting debut.”
Deborah Hufford is an award-winning writer and magazine editor with stories in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Connoisseur, Better Homes & Gardens, San Francisco Chronicle, many other titles. She is internationally known for her popular historical blog, Notes from the Frontier, with more than 100,000 readers, including many Native followers, history scholars and schoolteachers who use the blog posts as teaching lessons in in their classrooms. She also served as publisher of The Writer’s Handbook and The Writer Magazine imprint. She has a Master’s degree from the University of Iowa where she taught Writer’s Workshop students at the Center for the Book. She has also taught graduate writing and publishing courses at Northwestern University and Marquette University. She grew up an Iowa farm girl with horses and all kinds of critters and was a rodeo queen. She has volunteered extensively with the Chief Joseph Foundation (CJF) and brought in $300,000 in new grants for the Foundation’s youth programs. A portion of sales from Blood to Rubies goes to CJF youth programs. After 30 years of work on her debut novel while battling kidney disease, then a heart attack, then end-stage kidney failure, she signed with a publisher the same day her husband was approved as her kidney donor! Now, several months after her successful kidney transplant, Blood to Rubies is finally being published with wonderful literary reviews. Miracles DO happen!