My Antonia

Willa Cather makes a world which is burningly alive, sometimes lovely, often tragic

Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page

She is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's greatest American writers

Willa Cather was a wordsmith of enormous talent

In fact it's one of the warmest, most quietly rousing books that I know; a clear-eyed salute to the resilience of the human spirit and the innate hardiness of the immigrants who came across the ocean to start afresh in the golden west