"The prose is fresh and energetic, the story-telling superb, and the writing comes out as raw and terrifying as an exposed nerve." New York Times Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby, bucolic town-a legacy of hatred that reaches back to the violent founding of the nation. This literary masterpiece, back in print for the first time in over 60 years, includes a new Afterword by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography "A first-rate story of violence and congealed hate." New Republic "The story is electrifying." Saturday Review of Literature "A brief, fast book, and those pages are terse. Sanford has injected the drama of spilled blood that made America." Los Angeles Times "An unusual book with some brilliant pieces of writing, exceeding Celine and Faulkner in depravity and language." Kirkus Reviews

The Land that Touches Mine is the sixth novel by John Sanford, author of The Old Man's Place and Make My Bed in Hell. It is a gritty, hard-boiled tale about an army deserter, who hooks up with a carhop during World War Two, amid the brutal 100-degree heat of the California desert summer. Not only is the man on the run from the army; he's on the run from his own past. The novel, crackling with tough dialog, speeds toward a climactic choice: will he let the woman help him across the border to freedom in Mexico before his luck runs out? First published in 1953 by Doubleday (U.S.) and Jonathan Cape (U.K.), The Land that Touches Mine is arguably the finest of Sanford's eight published novels. The New York Times lauded the book's "muscular and economic prose," stating that "John Sanford makes a powerful bid for top billing in current fiction [with this] poetic, tragically intense tale," and concluded, "It is an absorbing narrative by a writer of great distinction and ability, guaranteed to hold the interest of every reader interested in the individual isolations and distortions of our modern world." In England, the New Statesman compared Sanford's use of language to William Faulkner's Soldier's Pay and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, highlighting "the italicized flashbacks that Mr. Sanford uses with such skill." And the Manchester Guardian wrote that "the combination of the tough and the tender in the texture of the book is curiously real and satisfying."

"Sanford is a supreme master at squeezing the last drop of terror and excitement out of a sordid, savage situation. The story sweeps along with an ugly force that will send sensitive souls in search of smelling salts." Pittsburgh Post-GazetteA trio of vicious World War One veterans descend on the farm in the Adirondack mountains where one of them grew up and his father now lives alone. They embark on happily wreaking drunken havoc at the old man's place and in the nearby town. But when a naive, mail-order bride arrives, she ignites a tinderbox of resentment, lust, and betrayal among the men that explodes in brutal depravity, bloody violence and shocking death.This hard-boiled, literary masterpiece, back in print for the first time in sixty years, includes a new introduction by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated BibliographyPreviously published as The Hard Guys and filmed as the 1971 motion picture My Old Man's Place."Sanford, not to be confused with contemporary thriller writer John Sandford, was a writer of hard edged noirs that bristle with tension and the threat of violence, when that is unleashed it's brutal and shocking. A stark portrait of humanity at its lowest ebb and a menacing atmosphere pervades the novel. This is ice cold, easily as brutal as the best passages of Cain or Hemingway." Crimetime UK"Sanford's The Old Man's Place is a carefully designed character study bursting with tension and intrigue. I found myself so emotionally invested in these characters and their raw, primal instincts. Nothing short of extraordinary. It's darkly wonderful and honest, well ahead of its time considering the 1935 publication date. Sanford possesses a rare skillset that rivals some of the best noir authors of all-time." Paperback Warrior

The People from Heaven , John Sanford's most ambitious and searing novel, completes his Warrensburg Trilogy, digging beneath the bucolic surface of a small-town to expose the hatred at its core. "A sacred book, majestic in its rebukes of those who violate the breath and origin of humanity while professing faith and going through the motions of holiness." Carl Sandburg The people of Warrensburg are divided by the arrival of a nameless Black woman. Her few allies call her America Smith, while the town's most prominent citizens try to drive her out. This clash results in rape and murder. Sanford punctuates this spare plot with poetic episodes from the nation's past, rooting the characters' actions in the violence of the nation's founding. He tells the story with an artistry of language that led the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature to describe him as America's "most outstanding neglected novelist." This new edition of Sanford's literary masterpiece features an introduction by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography. The other books in the trilogy are Make My Bed in Hell and The Old Man's Place. John Sanford (1904-2003) was a screenwriter and author who wrote 24 books. A one-time member of the Communist Party, he and his wife, the ground-breaking screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and were blacklisted in Hollywood for nearly a decade. "Only a warm-hearted and perceptive author who believes in the potential worth of humanity could have conceived the powerful conflicts, the trenchant syllables here. The fact that it succeeds in provoking an examination of national conscience as well as of person attitude also suggests its worth." New York Herald Tribune "Sanford's technique is arresting and every page has a savor and quality of its own." The New Republic