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Published Jun 2016
320 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A highly acclaimed novelist now gives us a true epic: a love story that spans sixty years, generations' worth of feuds, and secrets withheld and revealed.
The two principal stories at play in Wintering are bound together when the elderly, demented Harry Eide escapes his sickbed and vanishes into the forbidding, northernmost wilderness that surrounds the town of Gunflint, Minnesota - instantly changing the Eide family, and many other lives, forever. He'd done this once before, more than thirty years earlier in 1963, fleeing a crumbling marriage and bringing along Gustav, his eighteen-year-old son, pitching this audacious, potentially fatal scheme - winter already coming on, in these woods, on these waters - as a reenactment of the ancient voyageurs' journeys of discovery.
It's certainly something Gus has never forgotten, nor the Devil's Maw of a river, a variety of beloved (possibly fantastical) maps, the ice floes and waterfalls (neither especially appealing from a canoe), a magnificent bear, the endless portages, a magical abandoned shack, Thanksgiving and Christmas improvised at the far end of the earth, the brutal cold and sheer beauty of it all. And men hunting other men.
Now - with his father pronounced dead - Gus relates their adventure in vivid detail to Berit Lovig, who'd spent much of her life waiting for Harry, her passionate conviction finally fulfilled over the last two decades. So, a middle-aged man rectifying his personal history, an aging lady wrestling with her own, and with the entire saga of a town and region they'd helped to form and were in turn formed by, relentlessly and unforgettably.
"Capturing the strength and mystery of characters who seem inextricable from the landscape, Geye's novel is an unsentimental testament to the healing that's possible when we confront our bleakest places." - Publishers Weekly
"The relatively small and enclosed community is Geye's perfect laboratory for exploring human nature." - Booklist
"Reminiscent of Jack London's 'To Build a Fire' and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Geye's narrative takes us deep into both human and natural wilderness." - Kirkus
"In one beautifully etched sentence after another, Peter Geye's Wintering explores the remote wilderness of Minnesota, and the even more remote and mysterious wilderness of family history. I found myself lost inside it, in all the best ways a reader can be lost." - Alix Ohlin
"There's no greater literary pleasure than watching a master emerge. I've witnessed Peter Geye grow into that distinction for coming on two decades now. All I can say is Wintering proves his finest, most powerful work yet." - Joseph Boyden
"The last time I read a literary thriller so profound Cormac McCarthy's name was on its spine. But Peter Geye is his own man and Wintering is as unique and menacingly beautiful as its Minnesota borderlands setting." - Richard Russo
"An elegant, quietly profound, and harrowing novel. I loved this book." - Emily St. John Mandel
"Geye is a masterful writer whose elegiac prose captures both the holiness and brutality of nature. Wintering is a stunning book, one that takes hold of the reader from the first haunting line and never lets go." - Amy Greene
"Peter Geye writes with a nigh-mythic force. An extraordinary novel." - Jeffrey Lent
This information about Wintering was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Geye was born and raised in Minneapolis, where he continues to live. His previous novels are Safe from the Sea and The Lighthouse Road.
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