The Land that Touches Mine
John Sanford
Introduction by Jack Mearns
August 10, 2021 / 226 pages
ISBN 9780578937953 Paperback / $15.99

The eighth of John Sanford's published novels, The Land that Touches Mine (1953) is the story of a WW2 Army deserter's love for America and his disillusionment with its failure to live up to its founding principles.

The New York Times lauded the book's "muscular and economic prose," stating that "John Sanford makes a powerful bid for top billing in current fiction [with this] poetic, tragically intense tale," and concluded, "It is an absorbing narrative by a writer of great distinction and ability, guaranteed to hold the interest of every reader interested in the individual isolations and distortions of our modern world." In England, the New Statesman compared Sanford's use of language to William Faulkner's Soldier's Pay and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, highlighting "the italicized flashbacks that Mr. Sanford uses with such skill." And the Manchester Guardian wrote that "the combination of the tough and the tender in the texture of the book is curiously real and satisfying."