When seventeen-year-old Walter Pascoe sets out for his first season as a sheep herder, he quickly learns the dangers and splendors of the land. On encountering the beautiful trapper Trina Ivy, he finds himself awakening just as profoundly to matters of the heart. But amid the quiet passion that builds between lovers kept apart by miles of prairie and months of seasonal work, the slow specter of World War I is creeping over a world that heretofore had seemed immutable.
Heather Parkinson is twenty-eight. She lives in Idaho. This is her first novel.
'[A] lyrical, evocative debut novel…with a tenderness generally absent from more conventional books about this era in the American West.'-Publishers Weekly
'An immensely impressive debut… Parkinson displays an astonishing gift for depicting, soldier by soldier, the suffering and uncertainty of an entire unit of spiritually battered veterans returning home by train. Instead of keeping history at bay, as [Cormac] McCarthy so often does, she allows its unsettling presence into her novel, and the book is richer for it.' -New York Times Book Review