A sweeping love story set on a vast New Mexico cattle ranch, spanning two summers separated by twenty-three years. La Conquistadora is a quarter million acres of mesa and canyon - a country unto itself. At its heart stands Casa Blanca, the old whitewashed adobe headquarters where the Degarrin family has kept the land for as long as anyone can remember.
In the summer of 1946, Sophie Degarrin is nineteen years old, back from a year at college in Virginia, and the ranch is her kingdom. She rides the summer wagon with the crew, works cattle alongside her father's cowboys, and belongs to this land in a way she has never had to explain.
Adam Connor is a cowboy back from four and a half years of war. He returned to the only place that kept him sane. He is a hired hand with nothing but a saddle, a war bag, and a war record. He is not the kind of man the Degarrins have in mind for their only daughter.
Over six weeks on the open range, what grows between Sophie and Adam cannot be hidden - not from the crew, not from Sophie's friends, and not from her mother, a Virginia-bred woman who has spent twenty years mastering the art of standing at exactly the right distance from everything.
When the monsoon comes, it breaks more than the drought.
Twenty-three years later, Sophie's son Kyle arrives at La Conquistadora for a summer of his own. He rides the same pastures, works the same wagon, and learns from cowboys who remember things they have never spoken of. The secret his mother has carried since 1946 is everywhere around him - in the orchard, in the saddle shed, in the quiet between two people who have not forgotten a thing.
La Conquistadora is a novel about the loves that outlast us and the land that outlasts everything. It is about mothers and daughters, patience and recklessness, and the distance between the life you chose and the one you lost.
"The only thing that had ever changed it was the weather."
