His Royal Nibs

His Royal Nibs captures a vanished world: the Alberta frontier of the 1920s, where British immigrants arrived with government pamphlets full of lies and hearts full of desperate hope. Cheerio, an Englishman of modest means and considerable dignity, finds himself at the O Bar O ranch amid dust, alkali, and the brutal machinery of cattle drives. The land doesn't care about his dreams. Neither do the men who've been broken by war and hard usage into something harder than the prairie itself. But there's Hilda, whose fiery spirit complicates everything, and whose connection to Cheerio becomes the emotional axis upon which his new life turns. Watanna writes with sharp eye for the comedy of cultural collision: the pomposity of English gentility meeting the raw pragmatism of the range. This is a novel about starting over when you've got nothing but nerve, and what happens when the myth of the frontier meets the reality of men mending fences in the wind.