The Patagonia was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old- fashioned gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature.

The Desert of Wheat is a thrilling and romantic tale of sabotage in the wheat fields of the Pacific Northwest during World War I. A passionate novel of patriotic and anti-union propaganda, it portrays the anxieties of the young country threatened by a foreign war after the closing of the frontier. Grey captures the heart of a nation at the brink of a century of change.