"Amy Fladeboe reminds us that you can be lost in America more profoundly than you can be lost just about anywhere else. Richly detailed and beautifully complex, Let the Soil Rest is the most heartbreaking and unmoored kind of love story imaginable." —Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist and author of The Waters 

"Presided over by a ghostly collective voice I loved and remain haunted by, Let The Soil Rest is a powerful dissection of the American dream and immigrant experience. Polyphonic and moving, this novel holds the reader close, and renders its various characters–and their experience of desire, grief, grit, and dislocation–with the kaleidoscopic specificity of memory." —Ethan Rutherford, author of North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

"In this fine debut, Amy Fladeboe deftly shifts from familiar Midwest landscapes and mindsets to the unfamiliar and back again. Her story of a young Albanian refugee fleeing an oppressive regime could not be more thought provoking than in this moment, when for many, the word 'immigrant' is not just heard, but felt." —Sarah Stonich, author of Vacationland

“Let the Soil Rest conveys the punk spirit of life on the road and on the clock. We navigate the wreckage of the so-called American dream in this gritty, remarkable debut. It is essential reading for our time.” —Beth Meyer, author of We Will Tell You Otherwise 

“Amy Fladeboe’s Let The Soil Rest is a stunning novel about the promise and folly of the American dream. The characters Arjan and Jess are so painfully real. Fladeboe excavates their pasts and limbo states in elegiac, lyrical bursts, tracing their class anxieties, losses, and doggedness with humor, loving attention, and dexterity. I’m in awe.” —Josh Cook, Editor and Substack Author of Book(ish) 

“A tender narrative and heartfelt depiction of the aeons-old youths’ striving to come to terms with themselves and the world, the whole book reads like poetry. The younger generations have always been at odds with the old ways; it is these that have pushed the world forward.” —Adriatik Malaj, University of Vlora