Brendan Frain is the author of Monuments of Grass, a five-volume literary saga tracing the evolution of North America from colony to nation and from slavery to Black Lives Matter.

Born in post-war England and shaped by a lifelong engagement with the history and adventure of the American frontier, Frain emigrated to Canada, where his interest in the continent’s layered history deepened into sustained study. His work reflects an outsider–insider perspective — attentive to both the romance and the violence of America— examining how ambition, faith, greed, and land coalesce into national identity.

At the centre of Monuments of Grass stands Buffalo Rock, a carved monolith on the northern plains. Conceived in the eighteenth century as tribute to the great buffalo herds, the monument becomes the silent witness to generations shaped by war, homesteading, migration, industrialisation, and political upheaval.

Frain writes from the conviction that the land remembers what people choose to forget. His novels explore inheritance — not only of property or bloodline, but of myth, memory, and consequence.

His work is concerned less with nostalgia than with structure: how nations are built, how stories become legend, and what endures when the monument outlives the men who carved it.