New York Times Bestselling Author

The Bride’s House

With a perfect blend of masterful storytelling, sympathetic and realistic characters and prose as crisp as a Colorado creek, Dallas again spins a timeless tale of love and tenacity, tenderness and redemption. And “The Bride’s House” is ultimately a story of the confines of legacy and the fulfillment that can come when those chains are broken.
-Richmond Times Dispatch

The Bride’s House follows the lives of three women who live in an elegant Victorian mansion, in Georgetown Colorado. Young Nealie Bent arrives in Georgetown in 1880 to work as a hired girl and dreams of living in the Bride’s House with Will Spaulding, a wealthy mining engineer from the East, who takes her on long walks through the mountains as well as to the theater and to the town’s finest restaurant. Will is not the only one who pursues Nealie. Charlie Dumas, a laborer, wants to marry her, and although Nealie rebuffs him, Charlie refuses to give up. Ultimately, Nealie must deal with lies, secrets, and heartache before she chooses who will give her the Bride’s House.

Pearl, Nealie’s daughter, is raised by a domineering father, who keeps the Bride’s House as a shrine to Nealie. Pearl is 30 and well on her way to becoming a spinster when she meets the enterprising Frank Curry. When Frank asks for Pearl’s hand in marriage, her father sabotages the union. But Pearl has inherited her mother’s tenacity of heart, and her father underestimates the lengths to which the women of the Bride’s House will go for love.

Susan is the last of the strong-willed women to live in the Bride’s House. She’s proud of the women who came before her. Their legacy and the Bride’s House secrets force Susan to question what she wants and who she loves.

Set amid the boom-and-bust history of a Colorado mining town, The Bride’s House brings to life an unforgettable era and three unforgettable women.

Get the Reading Group Guide


Author’s Note

The Bride’s House is a real house, a once-elegant mining town home in Georgetown, Colorado. But it was a derelict when my husband and I toured it in 2007. The exterior was a shabby relic of its former glory. Abandoned cars were parked in the yard. Insensitive remodeling had stripped the house of its Victorian charm. Rain came through the roof, and raccoons lived in the tower. Still, when a preservation architect who accompanied us as we examined the place saw the elegant staircase, he exclaimed, “It’s a Bride’s House.” My husband, Bob, decided then to buy it. And I decided to write a book about it.The remodeling took three years, and, alas, so did the book. I got the idea for the first section when I was sitting on a balcony in Istanbul, gazing out over a fig tree to the sea (and decided I had to write this book just so I could tell that story.) The idea for the second part came to me a year later on a bus in Fiesole, high above the city of Florence. The third part, well, I should have taken another trip, because I went through half-a-dozen stories before I finally hit on one that worked.

Eventually, both the house and the book were finished. We love the house, and I hope you love the book.
2012 Sandra Dallas. All Rights Reserved. | Report a Problem |