The King's English Bookshop

Any good memoir is a search—for answers, for peace, or perhaps for a place to belong. Claiming Ground is all three. It begins with Laura Bell’s improbable decision to leave the East and academia to move to Wyoming and herd sheep. What she finds is a land of staggering beauty peopled by a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, and a blissful and terrifying solitude that is perhaps the defining characteristic of that land. Bell conveys the beauty and the terror, the loneliness and the oddly satisfying connections she manages to make, the pleasure she finds in doing for herself and in doing a job as well as any man, making this an unforgettable memoir, evocative in terms of the landscape of the human heart.