Prairie Silence: A Memoir

A rural expatriate’s struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people

Melanie Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets. A land where she imagines standing at the bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor; trees are the large alien plants reaching for the light; and the sky is the water’s vast surface, reflecti...