Maud's Line - Paperback

by Margaret Verble (Author)

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, this debut novel chronicles the life and loves of a headstrong, earthy, and magnetic heroine.

Eastern Oklahoma, 1928.

Eighteen-year-old Maud Nail lives with her rogue father and sensitive brother on one of the allotments parceled out by the US Government to the Cherokees when their land was confiscated for Oklahoma's statehood. Maud's days are filled with hard work and simple pleasures, but often marked by violence and tragedy, a fact that she accepts with determined practicality. Her prospects for a better life are slim, but when a newcomer with good looks and books rides down her section line, she takes notice. Soon she finds herself facing a series of high-stakes decisions that will determine her future and those of her loved ones.

Maud's Line is accessible, sensuous, and vivid. It will sit on the bookshelf alongside novels by Jim Harrison, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and other beloved chroniclers of the American West and its people.

Front Jacket

A stunning debut novel chronicling the life and loves of a headstrong, earthy, and magnetic heroine

Eastern Oklahoma, 1928. Eighteen-year-old Maud Nail lives with her rogue father and sensitive brother on one of the allotments parceled out by the U.S. Government to the Cherokees when their land was confiscated for Oklahoma s statehood. Maud s days are filled with hard work and simple pleasures but often marked by violence and tragedy a fact that she accepts with determined practicality. Her prospects for a better life are slim, but when a newcomer with good looks and books rides down her section line, she takes notice. Soon she finds herself facing a series of high-stakes decisions that will determine her future and those of her loved ones.

Warmth and verve infuse every page of Margaret Verble s vivid debut, and Maud herself shines as a revealing reminder of the measures enterprising women have always had to take to improve their circumstances in life. Maud s Line will sit on the bookshelf alongside novels by Jim Harrison, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and other beloved chroniclers of the American West and its people.
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Back Jacket

I want to live with Maud in a little farm in a little valley under the shadow of a mountain wall.Maud's Line is an absolutely wonderful novel, and Margaret Verble can drop you from great heights and still easily pick you up. I will read anything she writes, with enthusiasm. Jim Harrison, author of Dalva and Legends of the Fall

Margaret Verble gives us a gorgeous window onto the Cherokee world in Oklahoma, 1928. Verble s voice is utterly authentic, tender and funny, vivid and smart, and she creates a living community the Nail family, Maud herself, her father, Mustard, and brother, Lovely, and the brothers Blue and Early, the quiet, tender-mouthed mare Leaf, and the big landscape of the bottoms the land given to the Cherokees after the Trail of Tears. Beyond the allotments, it opens up into the wild, which is more or less what Verble does with this narrative. A wonderful debut novel. Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta

Writing as though Daniel Woodrell nods over one shoulder and the spirit of Willa Cather over the other, Margaret Verble gives us Maud, a gun-toting, book-loving, dream-chasing young woman whose often agonizing dilemmas can only be countered by sheer strength of heart. Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses
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Author Biography

MARGARET VERBLE, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, has set her novel on her family's allotment land. She currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and Old Windsor, England.