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.


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.
Heather Parkinson is lives in Idaho. This is her first novel.
As this affecting and artfully composed novel begins, 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 both 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 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. Amid 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, a strong and memorable debut novel infused with dignity, heart, and truth. "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"
"With echoes of Cormac McCarthy, "Across Open Ground" is a spare and lyrical portrait of the Great Plains."--"Idaho Statesman"
" "Across Open Ground"] demands to be read slowly, maybe even savored . . . Parkinson touches on larger questions about good and evil, man and nature . . . Vivid . . . An impressive debut."--"Booklist"
"When you read a beautifully written love story, love awakens wherever it has been sleeping in you. Not a simpering sentimental story, not a sex manual, but a story that conveys the balance of pain and sweetness that love is. You lean into stories like these, turning the pages quickly to get to the parts where the lovers finally enter their own world and leave the world of suffering outside. "Across Open Ground" is such a story."--"Los Angles Times Book Review"
"Heather Parkinson deftly captures the compelling allure of the isolation and beauty that has drawn men and women to the high mountain West . . . In the style of Virginia Woolf, the author often brings a luminescent quality to the narrative. The characterizations are first-rate . . . "Across Open Ground" is a powerful story, as much about change as about love and war."--"Rocky Mountain News" (Denver)
"Parkinson's prose can be strong moonshine . . . She] keeps a tight rein on description, roping it in just enough to give her novel a quietude still as morning."--"San Diego Union Tribune"
"Imagine a no-nonsense, earthy novel, a cross between the heartfelt sincerity of Kent Haruf's "Plainsong" and the staccato, aw-shucks delivery of an old "Gunsmoke" television episode, and you'll come close to imagining Heather Parkinson's novel . . . The prose style itself is engaging and impressive . . . Metaphors are polished and sharply honed, and her descriptions have a sleek polish that's wonderfully appropriate to her open-air settings."--"The Sunday Oregonian"
"The authority of the narrative voice and the author's developed artistic sensibility belie her age. Beyond that, she writes extremely well: clear and precise at times, evocative and lyrical at others. Parkinson seems to have a natural sense of when to let her prose run and when to rein it in to keep the narrative on course. She is an unusual writer in this regard."--"Idaho Mountain Express"
" Parkinson] paints with words so clear and precise that we are immediately transported through time and space to a storm-bedeviled sheep drive in the Wood River Valley area during World War I."--"Idaho Statesman"
"Beguiling."--"The Miami Herald" "A young Idaho sheep herder meets the girl of his dreams just as events conspire to part them in Parkinson's lyrical, evocative debut novel . . . Parkinson's homage to Cormac] McCarthy is especially graceful and poignant in her writing about the land, sheep herding, and the animals . . . The narrative is often powerful, and reveals] a concern for female characters and a tenderness generally absent from more conventional books about this era in the American West . . . This is a promising start for Parkinson."--"Publishers Weekly"
"In spring 1917, as the United States is on the verge of entering World War I, 17-year-old Walter Pascoe is learning the sheepherder's trade in south-central Idaho. Tension and uncertainty, as well as the usual sleet and snow, are in the air. In town, Walter meets Trina Ivy, stepdaughter of a rough and hard-drinking trapper. Love blossoms, but Walter is drafted in August and leaves for France not knowing that Trina is pregnant. In January 1918, at full term, Trina is living with Walter's widowed father when Frank Ivy and his thuggish pal Joe Moran encounter her as they rob the Pascoe home. Trina is beaten and loses her baby. Then Walter returns, physically unharmed but emotionally hardened by war, and upon learning what has happened kills Joe Moran. Then he finds Trina in an attempt to begin again. A simply and gracefully told story, this fine debut novel by a 26-year-old native of Idaho illuminates the torques and stresses of human life."--"Library Journal"
"A lyrical, lingering first novel, picturing the shape of the sky and the land . . . A kind of ballad to the American landscape . . . A mature, strikingly voiced portrait of the American West."--"Kirkus Reviews"