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The Land that Touches Mine is the sixth novel by John Sanford, author of The Old Man’s Place and Make My Bed in Hell. It is a gritty, hard-boiled tale about an army deserter, who hooks up with a carhop during World War Two, amid the brutal 100-degree heat of the California desert summer. Not only is the man on the run from the army; he’s on the run from his own past. The novel, crackling with tough dialog, speeds toward a climactic choice: will he let the woman help him across the border to freedom in Mexico before his luck runs out?
First published in 1953 by Doubleday (U.S.) and Jonathan Cape (U.K.), The Land that Touches Mine is arguably the finest of Sanford’s eight published novels. The New York Times lauded the book’s muscular and economic prose, stating that John Sanford makes a powerful bid for top billing in current fiction [with this] poetic, tragically intense tale, and concluded, It is an absorbing narrative by a writer of great distinction and ability, guaranteed to hold the interest of every reader interested in the individual isolations and distortions of our modern world. In England, the New Statesman compared Sanford’s use of language to William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, highlighting the italicized flashbacks that Mr. Sanford uses with such skill. And the Manchester Guardian wrote that the combination of the tough and the tender in the texture of the book is curiously real and satisfying.
