Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Borrowed Ground: A Novel of Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Standing Rock

Borrowed Ground: A Novel of Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Standing Rock

Ferrier, William, Jr.

Paperback

General FictionHistorical Fiction

ISBN13: 9798185241394
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 2 2026
Pages: 314
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.66 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
September, 1944. The amtrac smells like exhaust and the Pacific and the breakfast Kowalski lost somewhere past the reef. Elias Crow Feather keeps his eyes on the ramp.

He has been raised to trust ground. This ground has no interest in being trusted.

Elias is a Lakota Marine scout-sniper from Standing Rock, North Dakota - a man who learned to read land before he learned to read paper. At Peleliu and then Iwo Jima, that knowledge keeps him alive: finding water in limestone cracks by watching where insects gather, reading the geometry of Japanese cave positions the way his grandfather once read the geometry of a dry creek bed in August.

But the grandfather is dead. And the forty-four acres along the draw - land his great-grandfather touched the deed on in 1888, land under dispute by a surveyor's line and a government letter - are still in question back on Standing Rock. Still waiting.

Borrowed Ground moves between two wars fought on the same contested logic: the war on Peleliu and Iwo Jima, and the quieter war over land, language, and what a document can claim to mean. Elias carries both. His squad sergeant, Raymond Deke Dekker, is thirty-one and built like the Youngstown mill that made his father. His corpsman, Tomas Reyes, is twenty years old, from Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and carries two medical kits when regulations say one. Between the coral ridges and the volcanic ash, these three men become something the war did not plan for them to become.

The homecoming chapter is not a triumph. It is a Tuesday in autumn, the gumbo mud drying on the road from McLaughlin, Agnes at the filling station in her wool scarf. And then the work: the forms, the coffee tin, the deed, the nine acres still in question.

For readers of The Things They Carried, Matterhorn, and News of the World - a novel about what ground costs and what it holds, long after the fighting stops.

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Historical Fiction

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