Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1985
 
"Comedy and seriousness are woven together so skilfully that the effect is both unexpected and satisfyingly natural. JL Carr is a wholly original writer and he has written a lovely book quite unlike any other." - Nina Bawden
 
"It reconstructs a distant and dust-shrouded world, then sets it echoing with an outburst of violence" - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
 
The story is told by an Englishman who, fifty years earlier, had taught for a single year in drought ravaged Dakota. Like many an English lad, George Gidner had an infatuation for the Wild West, when at 25 the chance came to spend a year teaching high school in the middle of South Dakota he grabbed it. So began his life as a foreigner, historian of the true heroes of the frontier, and a lifelong affaire with the Dakota plains. Though he upset the establishment and lost his job, George had his fair share of admirers, from teenager Becky, to his landlord Henry Farewell, manager of the Settler's Bank. The battle at the crossing forms the climax of this tale of pioneering spirit; underlying it all, however, is a warning that, although we share a language, the American's may be disturbingly different.
 
"In 1938 it took me seven days to reach the prairie town where I had contracted to teach in its high school for a twelvemonth. An eight year drought had not ended, there had been bank crashes: deserted quarter-sections could be bought merely by paying off the back taxes. I found folk unfailingly friendly, helpful and kind, yet, at the year's end the United States still seemed to me to be a very foreign land. Plainly, there was something about the Americas which I had failed to fathom and, in this story, I have tried to hint at this unease. Yet, at the same time, I must remind those of my countrymen who read this novel that it was written during the 1980s, those years when we loitered warily and dangerously between East and West, two areas possessing immense powers of destruction." - JL Carr