From bestselling author Russell Martin comes a captivating new novel, a story from the American Southwest narrated by Sarah MacLeish, a physician who struggles with the multiple sclerosis that has necessitated her giving up her practice, and with a marriage that is seriously threatened by her disease as well as her certainty that the husband who cares deeply for her also long has wished she were someone else. It is a marriage from which she desperately seeks security and peace, while her husband Harry, an archaeologist, longs for passion, abandon, and experience of every kind.

While at work on the large excavation that Harry oversees--able to dig in the dirt but no longer able to attend to her patients' health--Sarah unearths the skeleton of a Puebloan girl with a deformed leg who seems to have been killed by a massive blow to the head. In her effort to understand something of the life of that girl, and to link the child to her own life and to her beloved grandmother whose long life is drawing near its close, Sarah confronts the ways in which a landscape can dramatically shape the lives of those who live upon it, the cultural and personal tension between continuity and stagnation, and the gnawing question of whether a safe place--and a secure and stable life--are anything more than dreams.

Russell Martin's The Sorrow of Archaeology is an intelligent, poetic novel with the complex characterization and layered plotlines of rich literature. . . . a lyrical page-turner with a knack for grappling with the deeper human questions of self-identity, personal history, and physical and emotional brokenness.

- Rocky Mountain News

Russell Martin has shaped a beautiful novel filled with grace, love, and wisdom. Digging metaphorically through ruins to create understanding, The Sorrow of Archaeology is a tale that powerfully examines cruelty, decency, dignity, and courage--with emotion that gathers like thunderclouds holding the promise of rain.

- David Lee, author of Legacy of Shadows, My Town and So Quietly the Earth

Russell Martin is a masterful storyteller.

- Bloomsbury Review

Martin is, first and foremost, a consummate storyteller.

- Kirkus Reviews