Kimball's first book, Harvesting Ballads (1984), although written and published first, follows Liar's Moon (1999) in its place in the projected "Prairie Trilogy." Its action takes place, counting flashbacks, from about 1885 to the 1980s and ranges over the Great Plains from a farm in Oklahoma near Piedmont to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And, if one considers its "Prologue Two," Kimball takes us back one hundred million years to the origins of the Great Plains and to the emergence of all of the forms of life that have occupied that huge sweep of space from dinosaurs to rodeo riders, wheat farmers, and WCTU members. Its "Prologue Three" surveys those who settled the prairies.

In fact, the central figure's great-grandfather seems identical with the Ole Man, the alcoholic horse trader that we meet in Liar's Moon. Powerfully and uniquely written, Harvesting Ballads continues a saga of the Everyman on the Plains as...