The Variation of the Compass: A Novel

A literary historical novel of three generations of Texas surveying, and the magnetic line that ran beneath them.In 1852 Amos Reeve rode west from Austin with a Gurley vernier compass, two chainmen, and a contract from the General Land Office. He had been a Baptist minister. The matter that ended his ministry was not in the contract.The survey took thirty-three days. The compass read eleven degrees and twenty-two minutes east of true north. The line he ran would hold or fail by that one number.Thirty-one years later, his daughter Hannah Reeve carries her father's field book east to Austin. The State Land Board has been convened. The boundary is in question. A neighboring claimant has filed against it. The country has not been quiet about the line, and Hannah is forty-six, and she remembers what her father told her about the work.The Variation of the Compass is a novel of inheritance, work, faith, and the long argument between a country and the people who measure it. Set across three generations of Texas surveying, from the Mexican land grants of the Republic period to the Reconstruction-era reckonings of the late 1870s to the State Land Board cases of the 1880s, it is told in a restrained voice that lets the country itself become a character.A companion to the Lights Trilogy. Read more