The World Still Melting

When Arlene and Paul Tobler gave up teaching careers to save the Tobler family farm, Arlene never imagined the eventual price of the move. Not hardship, not isolation, not even her own loneliness posed the greatest threat; it was the land itself that took away both love and livelihood.

Robley Wilson's The World Still Melting tells the story of the Toblers and their friends Harvey and Nancy Riker, whose abusive marriage ultimately costs the Toblers their happiness, and Burton Stone, the man in the middle, whose affair with Nancy is the literal trigger of the novel's action.

Good and evil play out on these three family farms, whose very existence is a vanishing part of a heartland giving way to corporate avarice. The Iowa of Wilson's novel is a place where keeping land and home has become a dehumanizing territorial battle, and where small farmers like Paul, Harvey, and Burton face the whims of governments, banks, and weather that bring drought one year and deluge the next.

Writing with great compassion, honesty, and remarkable skill, Wilson shows here what happens to real people in a hard place, where the traditional world is slowly but steadily melting away.