First published in 1953 by Doubleday (U.S.) and Jonathan Cape (U.K.), The Land that Touches Mine is arguably the finest of John Sanford's eight published novels. The New York Times lauded the book's "muscular and economic prose," stating that "John Sanford makes a powerful bid for top billing in current fiction [with this] poetic, tragically intense tale," and concluded, "It is an absorbing narrative by a writer of great distinction and ability, guaranteed to hold the interest of every reader interested in the individual isolations and distortions of our modern world." In England, the New Statesman compared Sanford's use of language to William Faulkner's Soldier's Pay and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, highlighting "the italicized flashbacks that Mr. Sanford uses with such skill." And the Manchester Guardian wrote that "the combination of the tough and the tender in the texture of the book is curiously real and satisfying."