Alysandra Dutton launches The Stolen Women in conversation with Gwen Kirby

A case of missing noble women and a determined young warrior who sets out to bring them home in this new and exciting ancient historical set just before the founding of Rome, for fans of The Song of Achilles, Circe, and A Thousand Ships.

Safinia is fine to focus on her training as a warrior, providing for her sisters, and minding her own business. She feels no great need to meddle in anyone else's, until women in her town, including her former lover, begin disappearing. Quietly, at first, but disappearing just the same. All of the missing women have vanished from powerful households, but their formidable fathers are in utter denial, claiming their daughters are off on trips, sure to be back shortly, with perfectly reasonable explanations for their absences.

Dissatisfied with the half-hearted attempts to hand wave away the alarming and mysterious cases of the vanishing women, Safinia takes matters into her own hands, embarking on a journey to a neighboring village in search of answers or at the very least clues that might unearth threads she can begin to pull at. Along the way, she meets an unlikely yet helpful search partner, a historian who calls himself Livy. But despite his eerie sense of knowledge, Safinia is unable to uncover to missing women, thwarted more often than not by the girls' fathers themselves. As war with Rome looms on the horizon, Safinia must face the reality that the only one she can trust to bring them home is herself.

Alysandra Dutton has crafted an expertly researched and indepth look at the Sabine women, one of history's most overlooked yet crucial stories that has inspired countless works of art throughout the centuries. It's a fresh, page-turning adventure, perfect for readers of Madeline Miller and Natalie Haynes.

Alysandra Dutton attended the University of Arkansas for her MFA, where she was awarded a dizzying number of fellowships and prose awards. Her short fiction appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature and The Sun, and she wrote THE STOLEN WOMEN with support from The Elizabeth George Foundation. Currently, she lives in Minnesota and is a teaching artist with The Loft Literary Center, leading an eight-week Historical Fiction workshop for neurodivergent writers.

Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the collection Shit Cassandra Saw. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has an essay forthcoming in Between Our Legs from University of Iowa Press and her work has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins, a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and teaches creative writing and literature at Carleton College.

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