"Richardson is a new American voice worth listening to.”  --Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars and Kook

Tributary tracks the extraordinary life of one ordinary woman who dares resist communal salvation in order to find her own.

From the strictures of Mormon polygamy to the chaos of Reconstruction Dixie and back again, Clair Martin and a small band of mavericks--white, black and Shoshone--take their place in the hinterlands of Zion.

Quiet revolutions are the strongest.
They change us from within.

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                            Praise and Reviews

"Tributary is a novel whose characters and time are so well inhabited, whose landscapes are so lovingly evoked, we wonder if Richardson is not speaking to us directly from the late 19th century, from a high bench above the Great Salt Lake. The language and writing are surefooted and fresh
and often startling the way the best poetry can be startling. Richardson is a new American voice worth
listening to.”  --Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars and Kook




“Seldom does a novel come along that is as beautifully written and emotionally honest as Tributary. Barbara K. Richardson captures the grandeur and harshness of the Old West in a young woman’s struggle to find a home and 
a family without losing herself. A lyrical and haunting story not to be missed.” 
                                                                                    --Margaret Coel, Author of Buffalo Bill’s Dead Now

“From polygamist Mormon desert settlements to the yellow fever-plagued Gulf to an Idaho sheep ranch,  Richardson evokes the 19th Century West and the human heart in all their complexity." 
                                                                                   --Barbara Wright, author of the Spur Award-winning novel Plain Language

"This is a gorgeous novel. This book does what art should do, which is to show us our lives with renewed clarity and better insight. Tributary takes the incomplete history and mythos of the West to task, and instead shows us some of the far more interesting and unexplored stories of the American West – Mormonism, racism, women who don’t need marriage or men. Beautifully written and engaging, this is a story of one woman and her refusal to cave into societal norms in order to seek her own difficult and inspired path."
                                                                                   --Laura Pritchett, author of Sky Bridge

"I've been hungering for a book like this since I finished Lonesome Dove--a tale of the Old West big enough to crawl into completely, full of magnetic characters, unspeakable dangers, and beautiful language. Tributary is the story of a ragtag group of frontier survivors. There is an exiled Mormon prophet who lives in a cave and a truth-telling black man married to a Shoshone medicine woman. They are constellated around Clair, whose disappeared parents and independent heart lead her from a joyless Mormon childhood to New Orleans and back to Utah's sheepherding outback. Sensitive (by nature) and salty (by necessity), Clair ekes a living out of a valley of dirt, scares the hell out of those who try to mess with her small tribe, has her heart broken in all the usual ways and opened again by the magic of nature, spirit, and friendship. It's a big hot fudge sundae of a book—you wolf it down, and then you regret it's gone. I loved it."
                                                                                   --Lisa Jones, author of Broken: A Love Story