Kristin Hannah looks at the Dust Bowl from a mother’s perspective

The Four Winds. By Kristin Hannah. Macmillan; 464 pages; $28.99 and £16.99

FLORENCE OWENS THOMPSON was 32 when she became the human face of the Great Depression in America. In “Migrant Mother” (1936, pictured), Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph, Owens Thompson is pictured with three of her seven children, her brow furrowed and her gaze distant. Widowed five years previously, she took odd jobs to support her brood, working in restaurants, following the crops which were in season and picking cotton. When Lange took the photo, the family was living in a camp in Nipomo, California, with other pea-pickers out of work due to a poor harvest. “I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids,” Owens Thompson said.

“The Four Winds” by Kristin Hannah, a bestselling novelist, tells a similar story of hardship and maternal devotion. Unlike “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck’s seminal work of 1939, it chronicles the Dust Bowl, when storms and drought led more than 3m people to abandon their farms in the Great Plains, solely from a female perspective. Elsa has married into the Martinellis, a family of hardworking labourers, following an accidental pregnancy; though her relationship with her husband Rafe lacks intimacy, she finds succour in tending to the land and livestock of their smallholding in Texas and bringing up their children, Loreda and Anthony.

As conditions worsen, Rafe begins to dream of California, touted as “the land of milk and honey”. He flees in the middle of the night, leaving Elsa and her in-laws to care for the youngsters. The arrival of scientists from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal relief programme, offers some hope, but the storms intensify further and food supplies dwindle. When Anthony falls ill with dust pneumonia, Elsa decides that they, too, must make the perilous trip to California.

As the Joads find in Steinbeck’s novel, California is not an idyll. With so many migrant workers crossing the border, farmers decide that they can get away with underpaying their pickers. The roadside camp in which the Martinellis live is squalid; government relief is wanting. Local residents turn their backs and express bigoted views about “Okies” (a catch-all term for those who have arrived looking for work on farms). When the labourers organise a strike for better wages, violence ensues.

Though Ms Hannah began writing “The Four Winds” three years ago, long before the outbreak of covid-19, there is a resonance in this fast-paced story of ordinary, industrious people made desperate by forces beyond their control. The rhetoric surrounding deficient government assistance, greedy businesses and the need for “radical change” might sound familiar, too. The book has weaknesses: the dialogue is often expository and the descriptions repetitive. Yet the abiding, timely message is that small acts of kindness—the handing-down of an old pair of shoes, the offer of a hot shower—are possible even in the direst of circumstances.