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Claiming Ground cover art

Claiming Ground

Written by: Laura Bell
Narrated by: Laurie Birmingham
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Publisher's Summary

In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics.

So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.

By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots. Brimming with careful insight and written in a spare, radiant prose, her story is a heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape and the peculiar sweetness of hard labor, to finding oneself even in isolation, to a life formed by nature, and to the redemption of love, whether given or received.
©2010 Laura Bell (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
Sociology Women United States
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What the critics say

“Bell’s extraordinary ability to impart a true sense of place on each page reveals a stark and stunning landscape populated with a playbill of peculiar personalities.” ( Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about Claiming Ground

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Profile Image for Denise Nerd

Enjoyable listen

The story is a little all over the place - I would have loved a deeper dive into particular parts. But I loved the description of the land, plants and animals.

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