Across Open Ground — Heather Parkinson

With echoes of Cormac McCarthy, an exquisite debut novel from America's heartland.

Seventeen-year-old Walter Pascoe sets out for his first season as a sheep herder and learns quickly the dangers and beauties of the land. Also awakening to matters of the heart, Walter falls in love with a beautiful trapper named Trina Ivy. As they grow closer, America is on the brink of entering the First World War, and is beginning to feel an economic strain and a growing sense of patriotism. When Walter is drafted, he is bound by duty to leave the land and his lover to serve his country.

With an economic eloquence and an ear for the poetry that permeates life lived close to the land, Parkinson deftly illuminates the rituals and disturbances of her characters' world. She sketches the strong bonds and shifting alliances, the intimacy and insularity of family and social life in the fledgling towns of the American West. Amidst the quiet passion that builds between lovers kept apart by miles of prairie and months of seasonal work, the slow specter of war is creeping over a world that heretofore had seemed immutable.

An epic novel about the brutality of nature, the yearnings of first love and the realities of war, Across Open Ground is a remarkable achievement. Parkinson has written a deceptively quiet work of staggering depth, infused with dignity and heartwrenching emotion.