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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.
"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."
"An elegant, quietly profound, and harrowing novel. I loved this book."
"There's a lot to love about this novel: the beauty of the wilderness, the tenderness of relationships, the craft…[There] is the feeling you get at the funeral of a loved one-how you ache to hear the stories you never knew so that you might round out the man…But in the sharing of stories there is healing, if not complete comprehension-and that, it seems to me, is the point and triumph of this novel."
"A page-turning cross between Jack London's naturalism and Jim Harrison's poetic symbolism…[Stitches] together two frequently dissociated strands in American literature: its dramas of beset manhood and its domestic chronicles…Wintering gives us both, vividly imagining an outward bound journey that eventually brings us home to a fuller understanding of ourselves."
"Geye's powerful third outing journeys to the frozen places in the American landscape and the human heart…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."
"Beautifully written [and] supported by immaculately conceived characters [and] Geye's instinctive sense of narrative movement…The relatively small and enclosed community is Geye's perfect laboratory for exploring human nature."
"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."
"Geye's assured narrative gradually unfolds a Jack London-like tale of survival blended with a Richard Russo-like picture of small-town intrigue…Geye dips into history with ease and comes out with a story as contemporary as anything flashing across our screens today. Wintering is a novel for the ages."
"Peter Geye's third novel is a work of great power and primal beauty, an epic literary journey into the forbidding
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.
"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."
"An elegant, quietly profound, and harrowing novel. I loved this book."
"There's a lot to love about this novel: the beauty of the wilderness, the tenderness of relationships, the craft…[There] is the feeling you get at the funeral of a loved one-how you ache to hear the stories you never knew so that you might round out the man…But in the sharing of stories there is healing, if not complete comprehension-and that, it seems to me, is the point and triumph of this novel."
"A page-turning cross between Jack London's naturalism and Jim Harrison's poetic symbolism…[Stitches] together two frequently dissociated strands in American literature: its dramas of beset manhood and its domestic chronicles…Wintering gives us both, vividly imagining an outward bound journey that eventually brings us home to a fuller understanding of ourselves."
"Geye's powerful third outing journeys to the frozen places in the American landscape and the human heart…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."
"Beautifully written [and] supported by immaculately conceived characters [and] Geye's instinctive sense of narrative movement…The relatively small and enclosed community is Geye's perfect laboratory for exploring human nature."
"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."
"Geye's assured narrative gradually unfolds a Jack London-like tale of survival blended with a Richard Russo-like picture of small-town intrigue…Geye dips into history with ease and comes out with a story as contemporary as anything flashing across our screens today. Wintering is a novel for the ages."
"Peter Geye's third novel is a work of great power and primal beauty, an epic literary journey into the forbidding