The Wild Impossibility

2019 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD WINNER

“The Wild Impossibility is a breathtaking novel about what it means to be a mother ... Cheryl Ossola is a fearless writer ... A beautiful page-turner!” —Katie Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Girls in Trucks and Embassy Wife

After losing both her newborn daughter and her mother, neonatal ICU nurse Kira is barely holding herself together. Then the visions begin: a teenage girl in 1945, a forbidden love affair, a baby, a gunshot, and a family secret buried for decades.

As Kira’s waking life unravels, the past presses closer. In wartime Owens Valley, California, an Italian American rancher’s daughter falls in love with a young man imprisoned at Manzanar, an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Their choices, made in a landscape of barbed wire, prejudice, and impossible longing, will echo into Kira’s life in ways she cannot yet understand.

Moving between World War II and 2011, The Wild Impossibility is a novel about motherhood, grief, racial injustice, and the stubborn endurance of love.