Set amid the cornfields of central Nebraska, The Beautiful Plain opens on a hot afternoon in a hay barn, where three adolescents push a cardboard box filled with a girl to the edge of the loft. What begins as a prank will reverberate for decades, especially for Laura, who learns that afternoon just how far she will travel for acceptance.
Rejected by her former husband and with her precocious child in tow, Laura returns to her hometown of Platte, Nebraska, to see if she can recover what was sent to the ground that summer afternoon long ago. Immersed in the unassuming beauty of the Great Plains and following a single year of one woman’s life, The Beautiful Plain invites the reader to reconsider where beauty and grace reside.