The calm lives of rural America collide with systemic forces: economic, political, cultural.

For Abel and Janine Bellamy, their parcel of dirt holds everything of value: home, family, history, life itself. So, when they are approached with a lucrative offer to sell the farm that’s been in his family for three generations, their refusal is predictable, and irrevocable. With support from family, and a cadre of close personal friends, including Harlan, a Native American school chum, they face the social abrasions and overt violence of a community that wants them gone. A story of intrigue and political maneuvering clashing with lives of common folk, their visions of the world, and the needs of a sustainable environment, Dirt probes the human psyche as it wrestles with basic moral obligations, its central conflict coming to a head when a newly elected county sheriff takes it upon himself to terminate the Bellamys’ reticence, if not the Bellamys themselves, as the whole community spirals into a civil war, from which no one will emerge unscathed.

As a writer who narrates dramas found in environments and communities far from the beaten path, John L. Purdy crafts stories about the shared, common ground of cultures that, at first glance, seem remarkably dissimilar. Peopled by characters at once recognizable yet uniquely original, his landscapes play a major role in these narratives of crisis and conflict, where survival is never assured, and secrets complicate the comfortable lives of well meaning people.