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The Shadow Catcher

By Marianne Wiggins

Simon & Schuster, 323 pages, $25

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History, biography, photography — these elements are wrapped into this novel narrated by a fictitious Marianne Wiggins. The book opens in St. Paul and moves west to the Great Plains and Washington, and the turn-of-the-century tale of Edward Curtis, who made iconic photographs of American Indians while an absent husband to nurse Clara. With images arranged through the story (as the late W.G. Sebald did in his acclaimed novel “Austerlitz”), Wiggins the author dazzles as she captures Western wanderlust and entwined stories with felicity and heart.