Red Earth, White Earth

Having fled his family’s farm at eighteen with a promise never to return, Guy Pehrsson is drawn back into his past when he receives his grandfather’s ominous letter, "Trouble here. Come home when you can.” He returns to discover a place both wholly familiar and barely recognizable and is cast into the center of an interracial land dispute with the exigencies of war.

Widely acclaimed when first published in the eighties, the timeless novel Red Earth, White Earth showcases Will Weaver’s rough ease with language and storytelling, frankly depicting life’s uneven terrain and crooked paths.

First published in the eighties to wide acclaim, the timeless novel Red Earth, White Earth showcases Will Weaver’s rough ease with language and storytelling.

Library Journal

In this sprawling first novel of whites versus Native Americans in modern-day Minnesota, Guy Pehrsson returns from California's Silicon Valley to ``save'' the family farm. He finds his French-Canadian mother, Madeline, living with his boyhood chum and high school basketball teammate, Chippewa activist Tom LittleWolf. Guy's modernization-crazed Norwegian father, Martin, has mortgaged the family farm to the hilt, while his thrifty, wheelchair-bound grandfather, Helmer, borders on death. Disputed land titles quickly lead to nighttime guerrilla warfare between threatened white farmers and downtrodden reservation Indians with Guy, the semi-outsider, caught in the middle. A strong and fine sense of the Upper Midwest as a distinct geographical region permeates this melodramatic epic that is scheduled to be a TV mini-series. Character development is adequate to very good. Highly recommended for public libraries. James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col.

Will Weaver has published nine award-winning books of fiction, most recently Barns of Minnesota and the novel Full Service. Several of his stories have been produced for radio and film. He lives and writes in Bemidji, Minnesota.