Main-Traveled Roads (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781761830365)

The American dream is a main-traveled road-long, weary, and paved with the sweat of the poor.

On the windswept plains of the Middle Border, the soil is the only master worth serving. For the families breaking the sod, the dream is simple: a piece of the world to call their own and the dignity of an honest harvest. They are the builders of a nation, fueled by a grit that turns calloused hands into the bedrock of the future.

But the prairie is a jealous god. While myths speak of opportunity, the reality is a brutal cycle of debt and isolation. A soldier returns from war to find his farm drowning in a mortgage; a woman realizes the endless cornfields are actually the bars of a golden cage. The true enemy isn't the wilderness-it's a system that values the crop more than the laborer.

As the harvest heat rises, the struggle for survival becomes a test of the human spirit. When nature offers no mercy and the bank offers no grace, what is the final cost of a patch of dirt? Will resilience endure the crushing weight of the plains, or will the frontier finally break the people who tried to tame it?