Publication date: October 1st, 2025
Synopsis:
November 1899. New York society belle Louisa MacGregor, heartsick after a broken engagement, flees her old life aboard the last westbound train of the season, whose track cuts through the very heart of the steep and forbidding Sierra Nevada Mountains.
When an early blizzard traps her train in a remote mountain pass, Louisa is fast asleep in her luxurious palace car. The big train proves too heavy to make it over the snow-covered summit, and the engineer makes a fateful decision: to lighten the load, he crowds all his passengers into the first two cars and leave the rest of his train behind to the mercy of the elements.
Asleep, Louisa does not hear the conductor's urgent cries, and she and her palace car are left behind. When she awakens, she finds herself cold, alone, and deserted in the most rugged wilderness on the continent.
She is near despair when a solitary mountain man--whom she comes to know only as 'Bandit'--locates her abandoned train. The handsome, mysterious Bandit--who seems to carry with him a deep sadness of his own--leads Louisa over the mountaintops and down to his tidy cabin, nestled in a secluded valley surrounded by the towering peaks of the High Sierra.
With no prospect of rescue until spring, Lou and Bandit must find a way to survive the deadliest winter in fifty years. Trapped in a wild mountain paradise that is by turns unspeakably beautiful and utterly terrifying, these two lost people must learn to trust each other--and, perhaps, find the true meaning of life, love, and redemption.
Rich with historical detail, wilderness adventure, and heartfelt romance, Winter in the High Sierra is a sweeping, inspirational, clean love story perfect for readers who enjoy:
Heartfelt clean romances
Nature and healing journeys
Inspirational love stories with grace
Snowbound survival stories
Western mountain wilderness stories
Historical fiction with emotional depth
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Blog Excerpt
★★★★★ A breathtaking romance of survival and second chances. Get yor copy today--you'll love it.
Imagine waking up in total silence... snow falling outside every window--miles from anywhere, completely alone. That's exactly what happens to Louisa MacGregor in Winter in the High Sierra by Robert Brighton.
It's 1899, and Louisa, a New York socialite with a broken heart, boards the last westbound train of the season, desperate to escape her old life. But when a violent Sierra blizzard forces the train to abandon several cars, Louisa, asleep and unnoticed, is left behind.
She wakes to a chilling stillness. No crew. No passengers. Just snow and solitude in the middle of nowhere.
Then comes Bandit, a soft-spoken mountain man with a past of his own. With quiet strength and a steady hand, he brings Louisa to the safety of his remote cabin. There's no way out until spring so it's only the two of them, and a winter that won't let up.
This isn't just a survival story. It's a slow-building, emotionally rich historical romance set against one of the harshest winters in Sierra Nevada history. As the snow piles high and the days grow colder, something begins to warm between them--something neither of them expected.
If you love immersive historical fiction, heart-deep romance, and characters who grow stronger through adversity, this is the book to curl up with.
Get snowed in with a love story full of quiet strength and bouyant hope. Read Winter in the High Sierra today.
Acclaimed author ROBERT BRIGHTON is an authority on the Gilded Age, and a great believer that the Victorian era was anything but stuffy. In his immersive fiction books, Brighton exposes the turbulence of the era - its passions, dreams, and disasters - against a backdrop of careful research on the places, sights, sounds, and smells of the time.
When he is not walking the streets in the footsteps of the Avenging Angels, sniffing out unsolved mysteries, Brighton is an adventurer. He has traveled in more than 50 countries around the world, personally throwing himsel into every situation his characters will face - from underground ruins to opium dens - and (so far) living to tell about it.
A graduate of eh Sorbonne, Paris, Brighton is an avid student of early 20th Century history and literature, an ardent and relentless investigator, and an admirer of Emily Dickinson and Jim Morrison. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their two cats.
