Growing up in southern Manitoba, Gander Stake learns to love the prairie, not for its vistas, but for its animal life and for the magic of the new machines that make it prosper. More agonizingly, however, he must learn how to love both his family and his grade-school sweetheart.
Set against the backdrop of World War I, this classic of prairie realism, first published in 1926, ponders whether the battle for grain is not as crucial to a nation's self-worth as the battle in Europe.