ONE OF HOUSTON CHRONICLE‘S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

“A beautiful, big-hearted, triumphant novel.”—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. His wife, Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.

More than a century later, Greta Nansen has finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage is over. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled, she makes the decision to follow her husband from their home in Minnesota to Oslo, where he has traveled for work, to end it once and for all. But on impulse, she diverts her travels to Hammerfest: the town of her ancestors, the town where her great-great-grandmother Thea was born—and for some reason never returned to. Braiding together two remarkable stories of love and survival, Northernmost wades into the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates the remarkable ability of humans to endure nearly unimaginable trials.

In his “finely crafted first novel” (Booklist), Peter Geye evokes the savage beauty of Lake Superior’s north shore and the bittersweet reunion of a dying father and his hurting son after decades of estrangement. When Noah Torr returns to his family’s Minnesota cabin to reconnect with his father, he learns for the first time what really happened 35 years ago-and how it changed his father forever. “This deeply moving, powerfully realized debut novel [is] inspiring, wise, and enthusiastically recommended for all readers.”-Library Journal

A writer and former ski jumper facing a terminal diagnosis takes one more leap–into a past of soaring flights and broken family bonds

A brilliant ski jumper has to be fearless–Jon Bargaard remembers this well. His memories of daring leaps and risks might be the key to the book he’s always wanted to write: a novel about his family, beginning with Pops, once a champion ski jumper himself, who also took Jon and his younger brother Anton to the heights.

But Jon has never been able to get past the next, ruinous episode of their history, and now that he has received a terrible diagnosis, he’s afraid he never will.

In a bravura performance, Peter Geye follows Jon deep into the past he tried so hard to leave behind, telling the story he spent his life escaping. It begins with a flourish, his father and his hard-won sweetheart fleeing Chicago–and a notoriously ruthless gangster–to land in North Minneapolis. That, at least, was the tale Jon heard, one that becomes more and more suspect as he revisits the events that eventually tore the family in two, sending his father to prison, his mother to the state hospital, and placing himself, a teenager, in charge of thirteen-year-old Anton.

Traveling back and forth in time, Jon tells his family’s story–perhaps his last chance to share it–to his beloved wife Ingrid, circling ever closer to the truth about those events and his own part in them and revealing the perhaps unforgivable violence done to the brothers’ bond.

The dream of ski jumping haunts Jon as his tale unfolds, daring time to stop just long enough to stick the landing.

As thrilling as those soaring flights, as precarious as the Bargaard family’s complicated love, as tender as Jon’s backward gaze while disease takes him inexorably forward, Peter Geye’s gorgeous prose brings the brothers to the precipice of their relationship, where they have to choose: each other, or the secrets they’ve held so tightly for so long.

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 relentlessly, unforgettably formed by.