As For Me and My House

Philip Bentley, a thwarted artist turned minister, and his wife have just moved to Horizon, a small Saskatchewan town struggling through the 1930s. Their story is told in diary form by Mrs. Bentley, whose descriptions of Horizon's false-fronted stores become increasingly suggestive of the Bentley's false-fronted lives. She also records the bleak oppression of a pretentious and puritanical social ambience, and of a constantly threatening natural environment that assaults the town's flimsy structures with seasonal cycles of heat and cold, dust and snow.

The novel closes with the Bentleys adopting the child of Judith (who may or may not have had an affair with Philip), determined to make a new life beyond Horizon. Ross depicts the trials of small-town life on the Prairies with a starkly repetitive style and beautiful clarity.