Overland - Softcover

OVERLAND is set in California, in 1942 -- or at least, a version of 1942. Because everything about Burbank in this novel is both utterly familiar and disquietingly strange.

George Godfrey has been hired by the US army to make a factory disappear. A Hollywood set-builder, his talents are required by the war effort to hide Burbank's vastaircraft plant from Japanese reconnaissance planes. George has to take a factory the size of a small city, and make it seem to be part of the suburban California landscape.

He builds streets and houses on the roof. With his right-hand man, Jimmy, he fills felt greenfields with fake sheep, employs extras to wander around the imaginary city as its fictional inhabitants. As the weeks turn to months, the Overland project becomes evermore elaborate, and George's superiors begin to doubt his sanity as he builds a fake"lake" where he can go fishing...Far below him, Queenie and her Japanese-American friend Kay work in the darkness of Underland, welding aircraft parts, with no sense of what's going on above their heads.

One day, they see a fishing hook descending from the looming darkness of the roof, and when they follow it, find themselves stepping out into a sunlit world they never imagined existed.

OVERLAND is a book like no other -- to be read in landscape format. Based on true events, it is a novel where characters' dreams and desires come down to earth with more than a bump -- confronting the hardships of life during wartime. As surreal and playful as it is affecting and unsettling, no-one other than Graham Rawle could have created it.