Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened Utah mother traveling an evocative route through the sites of her arid Western ancestry. As her narration fades, the dead speak their stories: a ragged Mormon boy; a hoarder's queer son; descendants of British squatters. They give no answers, but conjure vivid moments set in iconic-and diminishing-American places.
"Anderson explores the thorny entanglements of family, religion, and self, asking-with crisp, evocative prose-what portion of our lives do we direct, and what portion rests upon the 'dark hazards' of ancestral preordination?"
JANA RICHMAN, author of Finding Stillness in a Noisy World and The Ordinary Truth
"Anderson is a ventriloquist, channeling the voices of a multitude of spokespersons whose DNA, defiances, differences, and determinations magnetize them to the American West. This glorious chorus is by turns poetic, rural, conversational, formal, an aria of stories united by their common descendant. Literary and true, this is the hardest-and best-kind of book, taking no prisoners, forgiving nothin
JULIE NICHOLS, author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air
