Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page (Marina Warner)The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us (Rebecca West)Takes a knife and stabs you through the heart, by its joining of such ravishment with such pessimism (New Yorker)The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed itTo the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated lyricism, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.