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The Held Land: A Fractional Fiction
Paperback
General FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 23 2026
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.46 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres of Nebraska prairie. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. He rides east toward Omaha and disappears from the record.
In 1885, a Bohemian immigrant family purchases the land, never knowing who built the house they now call home. Eleven-year-old Anna Shimerda finds a scrap of oilcloth in the wall and carries it for the rest of her life, evidence of a debt she cannot name and cannot repay.
In 1993, Marcus Cole arrives at the prison built on that same ground. Over fifteen years, he learns the story of the man who first claimed it. On his last day, he writes a name on an index card and places it where papers were once hidden, putting back what the records tried to erase.
Spanning 159 years on a single quarter-section of land, The Held Land braids three classic works-Homer's Odyssey, Willa Cather's My Ántonia, and Tolstoy's Resurrection-into a novel about what we inherit, what we owe, and what the ground remembers when we forget.
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