Whispered Secrets, Whispered Prayers is a gritty, marrow-deep story of one of the families of Germans from Russia who settled on the American Prairie. Urs Wagnor is a sometimes crude and prideful tenant farmer with a fierce love for land that should be his. Instead, in the spring of 1946, in the wake of farm failures and foreclosures, his fields belong to "Humpy" Chris, a calculating landlord deformed in body and soul. Urs doesn't own his land any more than he owns the heart of his wife, Margaret, who loves the god that sustains her, just as it sustained her German peasant ancestors who settled and struggled on the Russian steppe a century before. Now, Margaret is pregnant again - and Urs wants a son.

The simple words and sentiments of common people belie the enormity and danger of human passions and their twisted and hidden source. Only their child, Annie, has the innocent powers of insight, imagination, and compassion that might save them from themselves. She perceives the desolate wind-flattened prairie as a never-ending expanse of death and rebirth, peopled with creatures of mythical dimensions.

Whispered Secrets, Whispered Prayers is a psychological, character-driven story in the tradition of Kent Haruf's Plainsong. It also recalls the terse, tense drama of O.E. Rolvaag's classic Giants in the Earth. Here, the vast dome of ever-changing sky shifts with the narrative from dreamy solitude to churning conflict. The author, Donna B. Mack, is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts and has a MFA in creative writing from UAA.