In the Library
O Pioneers!
Willa Cather, 1913
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 33
- Length
- Length 56k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
My Ántonia
Willa Cather
Cather goes back to the same prairie and the same immigrant girls, but tells it through a man remembering, so the whole book aches with distance.
£1.99
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Hardy gives us another woman who inherits a farm and runs it herself, with the same hard weather and a worse set of suitors.
£1.99
About the book
Nothing on the Nebraska Divide wants to be farmed. The sod is tough, the wind never stops, and every man who has tried it is packing the wagon and going home. One person looks at that country and finds it beautiful: a young Swedish woman whose dying father has left her a failing farm, two brothers certain she has lost her mind, and a debt. Alexandra Bergson mortgages what little there is and buys more land. Cather writes the wheat coming in like a resurrection, then refuses to let it stay a fairy tale, because the country that rewards Alexandra takes something from her too, under a white mulberry tree in a neighbour's orchard, on a hot night with the grain standing ripe. What she does afterwards, driving out to the state prison to sit with the man responsible, is the least expected act of mercy in American fiction. We come and go, she says, but the land is always here.