I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark

Brian Hall's compulsively readable novel vividly recreates Lewis and Clark's extraordinary journey into the unknown western frontier. Focusing on the emblematic moments of the participant's lives, the story unfolds through the perspectives of four competing voices - including the troubled and mercurial figure of Meriweather Lewis, the expedition leader who found that it was impossible to enter paradise without having it crumble around him, and Sacagawea, the Shoshone girl-captive and interpreter for the expedition, whose short life of disruption and displacement mirrored the times in which she lived. Filling in the gaps and providing a new perspective on a legendary American story, this brilliantly imagined novel brings the day-to-day life of the expedition alive as no work of history ever could.