Published to coincide with Richard Ford's debut hardback for Bloomsbury, The Lay of the Land Runner up for the Ernest Hemingway Award 1976 By the internationally renowned winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Robard Hewes has driven across the country in search of a woman named Buena who, twelve years ago, infused him with a feeling that has now turned into obsession. Sam Newel has travelled from Chicago seeking the missing piece of himself. They both find themselves on an uncharted hunting island in the Mississippi owned by an old man named Lamb. When these men converge on this strange land, each discovers the thing he's looking for yet triggers a conflagration of inevitable violence in this tense and brutal yet moving tale.