In the Great Quiet

A Novel

By: Laura Vogt

A pioneer unwaveringly endures the Oklahoma frontier in an epic adventure about a woman haunted by secrets and searching for home.

A cannon booms at high noon, and the race begins in the Oklahoma land rush of 1893.

Amid the crowd is Minnie Hoopes. Tenacious and fiercely independent, she is determined to endure the brutal frontier and create a life of her own. Guarding her solitude, she distances herself from bordering homesteaders and finds peace under the starry nights of the vast frontier. But this is outlaw country, and Minnie soon has the blood of two gunfighters on her hands. After a renegade outlaw named Stot discovers her secrets, she forms an unlikely friendship with him. With each passing season, Minnie’s past grows more haunting and threatens the future she has risked everything to build. Minnie raced into the Wild West alone, but her grandest journey in the frontier wilderness is one she never saw coming.

Based on the true story of the author’s great-great-grandparents, this sweeping and transportive survival story explores a woman’s connection with the land, her reconciliation with the past, and her elemental search for home against all odds.

Settle in, I’ve stories to tell.

©2026 by Laura Vogt. (P)2026 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“I was struck by the confidence and tenderness of Laura Vogt’s writing. Minnie Hoopes is a woman learning how to belong to herself, and the land run becomes a powerful backdrop for that transformation. In the Great Quiet understands how lonely and brave it can be to claim a life of your own. A beautiful, thoughtful debut.”—Rae Giana Rashad, author of The Blueprint: A Novel, a finalist for the 2025 PEN Open Book Awards and a Goodreads Choice Award nominee