Fire Along the Sky

Fire Along the Sky is a 2004 historical novel by Sara Donati, published by Bantam Books as a 610-page paperback.

Hannah Bonner's return is the opening. She comes back to her parents' cabin in Paradise without her husband and her son, and the novel withholds the account of what happened to them while showing that her parents can tell she has changed. Her work as a healer among the sick and the poor is presented as the means by which she begins to recover.

The larger setting is the war. The year is 1812, and the conflict that gives the book its title arrives as the next claim on her, taking her away from the household she has just rejoined. Donati writes at length and across generations. The Bonner family is the spine of the series rather than of this one book, and the novel assumes the household and its history without re-explaining them. Donati writes the period as a working world of settlements, illnesses, healings and quarrels, and the war reaches the household through the people who leave it, so Hannah's return is only the first movement of a story that takes her away again.