"Psychologically and politically penetrating, Blue Earth portrays the frailties and quiet triumphs of contemporary individuals coping with their own loss of land, family, and culture against a historical backdrop of unacknowledged violence and theft. Characters that are often both victim and perpetrator operate with complex humanity amidst the wide scope of Achtenberg's vision. This book is, put simply, magnificent." - Christine Stark, author of Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation

"In Blue Earth generations repel and embrace one another, and individuals are people you want to know. The characters in this novel dance with loss and despair, rage and hope. We are seduced by their historic burden and contemporary doings and undoings; see our own lives reflected in the book's dark mirror, even as we learn a tragic history kept from us by those who would forever erase our origins. Achtenberg takes the reader backward and forward in time, through the lives of people who are violently split open and cleave to one another in a desperation and relief that leap from the page. Memory is the thread that binds and finally lets them loose. This is a brilliant novel by one of our truly intuitive and accomplished writers." - Margaret Randall, author of Ruins

"Blue Earth is the story of the United States, a country that has yet to own up to its past in order to move on and heal. Achtenberg's passionate, brilliantly crafted language, combined with her profound ethical imagination, makes this one of the most important books to appear at this moment in our history." - Demetria Martinez, author of Mother Tongue

"Anya Achtenberg's Blue Earth is a thoroughly absorbing narrative, rich in both lyrical grace and historical depth. Farm and city, past and present, life and death converge on the land, lost by both its original and later inhabitants. Using dream, vision, and memory to enhance her compelling story, Achtenberg creates morally complex and culturally diverse characters whose lives are affected by loss, poverty, disease, and war, but whose ultimately redemptive encounters with one another take the book far beyond its Midwestern setting. - Martha Collins, author of Blue Front

In the great tradition of Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner, Anya Achtenberg writes of the violence, both past and present, that shapes the people of the vast American Midwest. It is a story of bloodshed, loss, despair and the search for redemption. Deep and searing, Blue Earth is perhaps one of the best novels of the past decade." - Kathleen Spivack, author of With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Plath, Sexton, Bishop, Kunitz et al.