ALL THE LAND TO HOLD US A strange and powerful landscape summons strange and powerful happenings Rick Bass brings a lyrical lushness to the harsh backdrop of West Texas in his masterfully crafted fourth novel. All the Land to Hold Us  is a sweeping tale of those who live on the desert™s edge, where  riches”precious artifacts, oil, water, love”can all be found and lost  again in an instant. Roaming across the salt flats and skirting the salt lake, Richard, a  geologist working for an oil company, hunts for fossils under the spell  of Clarissa, the local beauty who plans to use her share of their  plunder to get out of small, dusty Midland for good. A generation  earlier, a Depression-era couple, Max and Marie Omo, numbly mines for  salt along the banks of the briny lake until the emotional terrain of  their marriage is suddenly and irrevocably altered. The strange, surreal  arrival of a runaway circus elephant, careening across the sand, sets  in motion Marie™s final break from Max and heralds the beginning of her  second chance. Consequences reverberate through the years and the dunes  when Marie becomes indelibly linked to Richard™s own second act. With a cast of characters rounded out by a one-legged-treasure-hunter, a  renegade teacher, and an unforgettable elephant trainer, All the Land to Hold Us is  a vivid portrait of a fierce place and the inimitable characters that  possess the capacity to adapt to and also despoil it. The novel boasts  all the hallmarks of  Bass™s most enduring work”human longing and greed,  nature endangered, and the possibility for redemption are all writ  large on his desert canvas.